By Meg Schoerke | Book Review, Criticism
Dearest Lizzie: It’s hard to believe letters cross the Atlantic in less than the months of the old ships at sea in the nineteenth century. It does something to smother expression maybe. Or is it that I feel you would \not/[1]...
Read MoreBy Mark Jarman | Criticism
Here’s a story about never becoming a Southern poet, even after 40 years of living and writing poetry in the South. It is also about loving the poetry of the Fugitives, the poets who in the 1920s lived in Nashville, Tennessee,...
Read MoreThere was a time when V. S. Naipaul, reporting on the growth pains of the postcolonial world, was a favorite of the literary establishment. There was something eye-opening about the essays that began appearing in 1969 in the...
Read MoreBy David Mason | Criticism, Essay, Subscriber Only
Through how many lives have I traveled, in how many shapes found my being? —“The Priest” An answer may be given, it seems, before the question’s asked— a pause outside of time precede the immutable unwindings....
Read MoreBy Elizabeth Lyon | Criticism, Essay
Two hundred sixty-eight years after the death of Johann Sebastian Bach, and the composer is a bigger celebrity than ever. Just this past year, the New York Times has run stories with titles such as “A Pop-Up Shop that Offers...
Read MoreDaphne du Maurier was born into a family of artists and performers who had left their mark on literature and the theatre even before the birth of the most famous bearer of the name. In their early years in France they were glass...
Read MoreReading Baudelaire: “Je n’ai pas oublié” Poem XCIX (untitled) of Les Fleurs du mal is, for all its brevity, one of the great poems of memory. An attentive analysis will show us that it is at the same time...
Read MoreIn September of 1844 Ralph Waldo Emerson, acting on a whim, bought eleven acres of briar patch near Walden Pond, plus an adjacent three acres of pine grove. He was feeling flush, having just returned the final proof sheets for...
Read MoreBy Robert Crossley | Criticism
To undergraduate eyes Dr. John Cooke looked older than he probably was. Ivory-haired, thin but potbellied, with thick glasses that magnified his eyes and a hearing aid that he was constantly adjusting, he had all the credentials...
Read MoreThe German writer Johann Gottfried Herder once proposed that “[a] poet is the creator of the nation around him, he gives them a world to see and has their souls in his hand to lead them to that world.” Has there ever been a time...
Read MoreSeldom, very seldom, does complete truth belong to any human disclosure; seldom can it happen that something is not a little disguised, or a little mistaken. —Emma We are conscious of many frailties. Be thou...
Read MoreHolding the middle ground is harder And asks more judgment, no less ardour, Than to espouse exclusive themes And fly to one of two extremes. This must be part of what we mean By talking of a trampoline Where, yes, no...
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