Named at last
Box of mementoes reveals that young art critic Juan Ramírez de Lucas had brief affair with Spanish poetThe identity of the lover to whom Federico García Lorca wrote passionate verse in his final year has been a mystery ever since the poet's assassina...
Happy birthday Edward Lear, 200 today
'Old Derry down Derry', still known as one of the best painters of exotic birds as well as the master of nonsense verse, celebrates his bicentenary on 12 May"Old Derry down Derry" is 200 years old on 12 June. This is the pseudonym that Edward Lear used...
Edward Lear, master of the nonsense rhyme
Edward Lear was born 200 years ago this week. Remembered as one of the finest writers of nonsense poetry and limericks, he was also an accomplished artist, and drawing teacher to her majesty Queen VictoriaEdward Lear, one of the foremost writers of non...
The Marlowe Papers: playing poetically with the playwright’s murder
Literary dialogue comes in many forms – webs of allusion, reference and literary homage. And Ros Barber's new novel The Marlowe Papers takes this conversation to another levelOne of the secret pleasures of reading is watching books and writers talk t...
Letters: Browning’s bicentenary is worth celebrating
John Dugdale is quite right to point out that Browning has been overshadowed by Dickens in their bicentenary year (Review: The week in books, 5 May), but this is not for lack of attempts on the part of the Browning Society and others to mark the occasi...
No place for a poet
The poet Talha Ahsan is awaiting extradition to the US, where he faces a life in detention virtually deprived of human contactAs you will know, I am not in any way a fan of arguments which claim that artists are more sensitive than others, or indeed li...
Inviting a Friend to Supper by Ben Jonson
Ben Jonson makes a graceful and witty invitation to his patron, William Herbert, to Come Dine with HimThe Epicureanism of this week's poem, Ben Jonson's Inviting a Friend to Supper, serves as a reassuring end-of-holiday reminder that it's not impossib...
Why such muted celebrations for Robert Browning’s bicentenary?
Punch lampooned him, Wilde and James mocked him, but 'taken as a whole the man was great'It's Robert Browning's misfortune to be more often remembered as material for jokes or as the victim of humiliation than as the author of Men and Women, Dramatis P...
The Saturday poem: Thoughts of the Poet
By John Hartley WilliamsIt is necessary to be hungry to achieve fame.Only then will your work be read or memorisedby keepers of the gates, donkey drovers, geishasitinerant monks who will teach children to read it.Your sentences must curve like arrows a...
William Wordsworth edited by Stephen Gill – review
This generous selection of his work offers the perfect occasion to revisit the poet"Michael", the final poem in Lyrical Ballads, begins quietly with a line that is nearly a promise and not quite an invitation: "If from the public way you turn your step...
Letters: Tagore’s legacy is political as well
You are right to note the 150th anniversary of the birth of the poet Rabindranath Tagore but neglect his politics in your editorial (The poet at 150, 30 April). For example, he repudiated his knighthood in protest against the Amritsar massacre in 1919,...
Robert Browning – a poet worth remembering | Margaret Reynolds