Topic description and stories

Poems on the Underground.

Poems on the Underground archive arrives at Cambridge University Library

23 Feb 2024

Beloved poetry project archive contains letters from Nobel Prize winners and Poet Laureates

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Mathelinda Nabugodi

The poetry scholar, the Black Atlantic and the Trembling Hand

13 Mar 2023

Mathelinda Nabugodi investigates the impact of colonialism and the slave trade on Romantic poets. Her research has taken her into the archives with...

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The social scientist who inadvertently became a poet

25 Mar 2022

At the age of thirteen Mona Jebril found herself stranded in Gaza, becoming a refugee for the second time in her life. Her talent and determination...

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Virgil has the edge on Shakespeare in helping students to love literature

14 Feb 2022

Students who study Virgil’s Aeneid at school find it significantly more engaging than other ‘high-prestige’ literature, even though they only learn...

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The Lost Words: a ‘spell book’ that closes the gap between childhood and nature

01 Jan 2022

The Lost Words is a book by Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris that summons the magic of nature to help children find, love and protect the natural...

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Ancient Greek ‘pop culture’ discovery rewrites history of poetry and song

08 Sep 2021

New research into a little-known text written in ancient Greek shows that ‘stressed poetry’, the ancestor of all modern poetry and song, was already...

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A treasure trove of unseen writing by Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney reveals a vital creative friendship

14 Nov 2020

A unique archive acquired by Pembroke College Cambridge transforms our understanding of the two poets, showing how they drew career-defining...

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The forgotten poet of Fordham

10 Dec 2019

Handwritten verses from a nineteenth-century Cambridgeshire poet – who died destitute despite royal patronage – have been saved by Cambridge...

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Print of The Peterloo Massacre by Richard Carlile (1819)

Shelley’s Peterloo poem took inspiration from the radical press, new research reveals

16 Aug 2019

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy , the most celebrated literary response to the Peterloo massacre – which has its bicentenary on 16 August...

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Epic issues: epic poetry from the dawn of modernity

02 Aug 2018

Epic poems telling of cultures colliding, deeply conflicted identities and a fast-changing world were written by the Greeks under Roman rule in the...

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‘They sailed away, for a year and a day’: why learning poetry by heart is good for you

28 Sep 2017

Most of us can quote snatches of poetry - but which poems can we recite in their entirety? In a survey of memorised poetry, Lear’s The Owl and the...

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'Swifts' lithograph from Carry Akroyd's 'Found in the Fields' series (detail)

Poet, activist, bird watcher: exploring John Clare as nature writer

29 Aug 2017

At a symposium next month (15 September 2017) academics, artists and ornithologists will share their responses to the work of 19th-century poet John...

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