Before English became the language of Shakespeare, empire, science, pop songs, and the lingua franca of the world, it was the speech of farmers, monks, and kings spoken only on a cold island at the ...

“What is poetry? Why, sir,” roared Dr. Johnson to his ever-attentive Boswell, “we all know what light is, but it is not easy to tell what it is . . . It is much easier to say what it is not.” Poetry ...

Long before pens met parchment in monasteries, an illiterate herdsman named Caedmon changed the course of English literature. Inspired by a divine dream, he composed the first known Christian hymn in ...

A lost medieval manuscript in Rome has revealed an early version of 'Cædmon’s Hymn', linking English poetry’s origins to a ...

Did you know that English used to be viewed as a language for everyday people? For a long time, scholars preferred to write in Latin or French. English literature is an incredible collection of ...

This fall it may not be raining poetry but new shoots and sprouts are hard to ignore. Be it Rhapsody Roads of Ravi Shankar Etteth or Mukul Kumar’s Catharsis or Amy Singh’s Singing Over Bones: Poems of ...

Revise for your GCSE English literature exam by listening to these podcasts from BBC Bitesize and Sounds. Join host Testament plus special guests to compare a range of selected poems, looking at ...

The Department of English Language and Literature aims to teach all students to write and speak well and to read skillfully, thoughtfully and with pleasure. We offer many courses that stress literary ...

Another international milestone was crossed recently by Indian poetry for English. An English publisher has chosen to publish, and make available for distribution in and outside India, an annual ...