Housman, Horace, and Metre

In Peter Parker's 2016 work Housman Country: Into the Heart of England, he includes, and subsequently returns to, an incredibly significant anecdote when it comes to unpacking the complex life of the classicist-poet A. E. Housman. Parker describes the event, quoting a description written by one of Housman's students: "Having dissected Horace's ode Diffugere nives, redeunt iam …

Love in Virgil’s Aeneid

Earlier this year, I wrote an essay for the St John's College, Oxford Classics Essay Competition (CAHEC2019). The question was 'Is love a narrative force to be reckoned with in epic?', and I chose to focus on arguably the greatest work of Latin literature, Virgil's Aeneid. The concept of love in this poem refuses to be …

The Man Booker at Fifty

This year, the Man Booker Prize saw its fiftieth iteration, granting literary prestige to the first ever Northern Irish winner, Anna Burns, for her novel 'Milkman'. Since its inception in 1968, the Booker Prize has been a focal point of British culture, and more widely of the literary world. After half a century of competition …

Pastoral Poetry: Arcadia Through the Ages

This Blog post was originally written as an article for The Society of Classical Poets, which can be found here: http://classicalpoets.org/essay-pastoral-poetry-arcadia-through-the-ages/ “Come live with me and be my Love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dale and field, And all the craggy mountains yield.” —Christopher Marlowe These fervent lines are some …