poetry 60

What should we make of a marionette production? What should we make of an artificial park?

By 1926, Lewis had read enough of Eliot’s poetry to conclude it a great waste and devised a prank against Eliot that involved submitting mock-modernist poetry to "The Criterion."

The title poem, “Home Song,” is deceptively simple in its sing-song iambic trimeter and mostly monosyllabic words. Yet the reader is pulled quickly into a dream of home, hearth, children,…

There is nothing greater in which to delight and nothing vaster in terms of the scope of His Being or understanding than God.

Hicks's voice is that of a mature seeker, a seeker of hidden beauties and of home in a variety of places.

What has Ezra Pound to offer to the citizens of the Front Porch Republic?

Smith's poem has returned to my mind several times, especially in moments, like our current one, of cultural and political turmoil.

They accepted that the law of human judgment was Mercy—after all, that was the law of divine judgment.

We've made it all the way from the overstepping of Orpheus, the land, and poetry into something our own lives can do (spill over as though water from a fountain--or,…

This is Goethe’s experience. And mine.

AI is a technology that eliminates process. It offers the grail without the quest.

The one observation on which all the Brothers focused with most interest, though, was what I might describe as the words beyond words. These poems are not just about a…

Poetry must be experienced, and the experience of poetry is itself a means of searching, a kind of hunting, for wisdom.

To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.

However, in St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of…

Her work is certainly redolent of sorrow and, as she describes it, the eternity that dwells within her. But her words also carry hope and surprising faith that she will…

But I reckon that eÞanðun can mix with Beowulf and Paradise Lost and not feel out of place.

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem…

How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them…

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first heard it at a high school friend’s Christmas concert…

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more…

While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward)…

Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…

Conjuring makes me think of force and manipulation, which as writers we have to forswear. Readers will either notice they're being manipulated and throw our books aside—or maybe worse, they…