Marie Ponsot’s (April 6, 1921 – July 5, 2019) use of her personal experiences never degenerates into the maudlin, nor does she invoke the circumstances of her life simply for dramatic effect. In Strange Good Fortune: Essays on Contemporary Poets… Read More ›
Kenneth Rexroth (December 22, 1905 – June 6, 1982) wrote in the tradition of contemplative, mystical, visionary, philosophical, and prophetic poets such as William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Dante, Du Fu, Zeami Motokiyo, and Sappho,… Read More ›
Charles Olson’s (27 December 1910 – 10 January 1970) poetry is political in a profound, not superficial, sense; it does not spend time naming “current events,” but rather devotes itself to defining “the dodges of discourse” that have enabled humanity… Read More ›
Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s (born March 24, 1919) poetry may be looked on as a kind of travelog in which he has subjectively recorded choice experiences or montages from experience, often in a jazzlike or free-associative manner. For Ferlinghetti, “reality” itself becomes… Read More ›
Of the many metaphors that Robert Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) applied to his poetry—and very few poets have been so perceptive and articulate about their own practice—those dealing with limits, boundaries, and margins are numerous and… Read More ›
The Fugitives, a group of poets from Nashville, Tennessee, led the vanguard for modernist verse in the South in the 1920s. In contrast to the Imagist movement centered in England, the Fugitives emphasized traditional poetic forms and techniques, and their… Read More ›
Between 1919 and 1934 African-American artists flocked to New York City, specifically to Harlem. This era was to become one of the most prolific periods of African-American writing. What Alain Locke called in 1925 a “New Negro Movement” was later… Read More ›
The Black Arts movement was a controversial literary faction that emerged in the mid-1960s as the artistic and aesthetic arm of the Black Power movement, a militant political operation that rejected the integrationist purposes and practices of the Civil Rights… Read More ›
When Mabel Loomis Todd published this poem in the 1890 Poems under the rubric of nature poems, she set a precedent that would be followed by editors for more than half a century. Todd may have seen it as a… Read More ›
One of Dickinson’s most famous and widely discussed poems, Fr 479 appeared in the first 1890 edition of her poems, edited by Mabel Loomis Todd and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. Higginson had given it the inappropriate title “The Chariot,” thinking, perhaps,… Read More ›
In 1956, Eliot published On Poetry and Poets, his first major compilation of previously published essays since Selected Essays in 1932. Among the essays collected in the later volume is “What Is Minor Poetry?,” which Eliot had first delivered as… Read More ›
Another essay from that period in Eliot’s career as a social and literary critic when he was staking out the parameters of his conservative views, Religion and Literature was originally from a lecture organized by the Reverend V. A. Demant… Read More ›
Composed during the same period of early creative energy, innovation, and experimentation of 1910–11 that produced The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” and “Preludes,” with which it was later collected in his first major… Read More ›
First presented on April 19, 1955, as a lecture at a literary luncheon organized by the London Conservative Union, The Literature of Politics was later collected in Eliot’s last collection of prose, To Criticize the Critic, which was published posthumously… Read More ›
In his preface, Eliot succinctly summarizes his aim and his hopes for this work, itself the published result of three lectures that he had delivered at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, in March 1939 at the invitation of the Boutwood Foundation…. Read More ›
First presented as the Gideon Seymour Lecture at the University of Minnesota in 1956 and subsequently collected in On Poetry and Poets, this essay takes up where The Function of Criticism had left off some 33 years earlier. While it… Read More ›
This essay was presented in 1944 as the Presidential Address to the Virgil Society, then published by Faber & Faber in 1945, and finally collected in On Poetry and Poets in 1956. Eliot begins his remarks by moving straight to… Read More ›
On September 17, 1932, Eliot set sail from England, where he had been in residence virtually nonstop since the late summer of 1915, to assume for the coming academic year the Charles Eliot Norton professorship at his alma mater, Harvard… Read More ›
Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot himself gives an uncustomarily detailed account of the publication of Notes towards the Definition of Culture in his brief preface to the booklength edition first published in November 1948. Four years earlier,… Read More ›
There are a handful of indisputable influences on Eliot’s early and most formative period as a poet, influences that are corroborated by the poet’s own testimony in contemporaneous letters and subsequent essays on literature and literary works. Foremost among those… Read More ›
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