For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
For readers and thinkers on whom nothing is lost
I must admit, I find myself somewhat uninspired this time of year. In search of a remedy, I turn to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, to see if an answer lies within the icy wastes of his South Pole.
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As a fan of the Hunger Games series, I was pleased to find that Suzanne Collins has reached a similar level of quality with ‘The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes’. As an English graduate, I was not expecting to find in the book a relationship to the Romantic poets substantial enough to sink my teeth into. Here, I do exactly that— I consider the true significance of the fraught relationship between Coriolanus Snow and Lucy Gray Baird, a journey that will take us via Rousseau, Hobbes and Wordsworth.
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‘La Belle Dame’ is one of Keats’ most enigmatic of poems, detailing the love and loss of a certain ‘Knight at arms’ the nature of which we are never properly told. But beyond the individual pining of a man over his lost ‘Lady in the Meads’, is there a wider truth that Keats is trying to tell, concerning the direction of literature and the fate of his fellow Romantics as a whole?
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It is rare in modern media to see anyone other than the most theatrical of villains drinking wine from a cup fashioned out of a human skull. But whilst we may shudder at the idea, Lord Byron insists that we should find solace in disregarding the supposed sanctity of our human remains.
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The interpretation of dreams is a subject that has fascinated scholars across time and provided inspiration for countless works of literature. Dante Alighieri’s eminent The Divine Comedy begins with its narrator ‘so full of sleep’ that he finds himself lost in a ‘great forest’, whilst Cicero ends his De Republica, a dialogue so rooted in the complex, rational politics of the Roman Republic, with a Platonic dream vision promising a […]
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If there was an era in which it could be argued that the mind of the modern man was born, it would be the Enlightenment period. As Pagden writes, the era ‘[stood] for the claim that all individuals have the right to shape their own end for themselves rather than let others do it for them’,[1] and as philosophers like Voltaire denounced monoliths like Christianity as a ‘long-standing infection’ whose […]
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