essay for 1984

Who Said ‘Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori’?

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Let’s begin this week with a nice straightforward poetry question. Which poet gave us the quotation, ‘dulce et decorum est pro patria mori’?

The war poet Wilfred Owen has made these words resonate with new meaning in the last century or so, but we owe the line to a much older, very different poet.

A Summary and Analysis of Ray Bradbury’s ‘Zero Hour’

‘Zero Hour’ is a 1949 short story by the American author Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), included in his 1953 collection The Illustrated Man . In the story, which is set in a future America, a young girl is befriended by an alien who needs her help to invade Earth and kill the adults.

You can read ‘Zero Hour’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of Bradbury’s story below. The story takes around fifteen minutes to read.

‘To Strive, to Seek, to Find, and Not to Yield’: Tennyson’s Ulysses

The line ‘to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield’, with its quartet of infinitives, is one of Tennyson’s most memorable quotations. The line concludes one of his finest dramatic monologues (a literary mode Tennyson, along with his fellow Victorian poet Robert Browning, did much to invent and develop), ‘Ulysses’.

A Summary and Analysis of ‘The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham’ by H. G. Wells

‘The Story of the Late Mr Elvesham’ was first published in May 1896 in the Idler magazine. It’s one of the best stories of H. G. Wells (1866-1946), who left behind dozens of classic short tales which laid the foundations for modern science fiction.

A Summary and Analysis of E. E. Cummings’ ‘In Spite of Everything’

‘In Spite of Everything’ (or, as the poet himself has it, without capitals, ‘in spite of everything’) is a short lyric poem by the American modernist poet E. E. Cummings (or, as he would himself have it, e. e. cummings). Cummings (1894-1962) was an innovative and distinctive poet famed for his lack of capital letters in his poetry and his idiosyncratic approach to punctuation.

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