AN excursion through eight or ten centuries of verse is an undertaking like the circumnavigation of the globe; the space to be traversed is so great that it takes a life-time to make the way familiar.

London’s British Museum has removed two poems by the early-20th-century feminist revolutionary and poet Qiu Jin from view after Vancouver writer Yilin Wang accused the institution of reproducing her ...

When I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make ...

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in 1817. More than 200 years later, and it has become the stuff of many pupil's nightmares ...

Publishers might find their next big literary hit comes from a so-called minority British language. Shakespeare ruined poetry. When Early Modern English Literature was still in its infancy, along came ...

Al Alvarez, a British poet, critic and best-selling author who championed the work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, wrote a provocative study of suicide and explored his own risky pastimes in books ...