The Tale of Wade, twice referred to in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poems, survives only in a tiny fragment. Two academics argue a scribe’s error deepened the confusion around it.
Tag: Poetry and Poets
James Lloydovich Patterson, 91, Dies; Soviet Poet and Symbol of Racial Unity
Years after being catapulted to national fame in the U.S.S.R. as a child actor, he wrote about ideals of racial harmony and international solidarity.
Memory Palace
Memorizing a poem is like taking a work of art that you love and letting it live and bloom inside of you.
At 13, Charlotte Brontë Already Knew How Good a Writer She Would Be
An anthology of her teenage poetry, published for the first time, shows ambition, even if the verse isn’t perfect.
Not Time’s Fool: A Rare Version of a Shakespeare Sonnet Is Discovered
An Oxford researcher found a rare, handwritten variation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous love poems. About 400 years ago, its meaning might have been very different.
Maria Teresa Horta, the Last of Portugal’s ‘Three Marias,’ Dies at 87
The book on which she collaborated with two fellow feminists drew global attention to the repression of women under their country’s dictatorship.
Reading Aloud
Reading alone is a deeply enjoyable activity. But being read to has its own irreplaceable allure.
Writers Silenced by Stalin Get New Life Amid War in Ukraine
The Soviet regime killed a generation of literary artists in the 1930s. Their legacy is being reclaimed as Ukraine fights to preserve its cultural heritage.
Breyten Breytenbach, Anti-Apartheid Writer in Exile, Dies at 85
He wrote poetry in Afrikaans and prose in English in his fight against South African racial oppression, an effort that landed him in jail for seven years.
Madeleine Riffaud, ‘the Girl Who Saved Paris,’ Dies at 100
Humiliated by a Nazi officer as a teenager, she joined the French Resistance. By the time she was 20, she had killed a German soldier, survived torture and captured a supply train.