Ronald A. Sharp is Professor Emeritus of English at Vassar College, where he was also Dean of the Faculty from 2003 to 2008. Before coming to Vassar he was John Crowe Ransom Professor of English at Kenyon College, where he also served as Provost, Acting President, and Editor of the Kenyon Review. His six books focus on poetry, Romanticism, Keats, and friendship.
Nonfiction
Winter 1999
Keats and Friendship
This essay was originally delivered with a paper at the Keats Bicentennial Conference at Harvard in 1995. It appears, along with other selected papers, in The Persistence of Poetry: Bicentennial […]
Editor's Notes
Spring 1980
Editorial: Friendship
Editorial Wayne Booth’s essay in this issue of The Kenyon Review attempts to revitalize the ancient metaphor of the author-reader relationship as a friendship. No doubt it will surprise some […]
Book Reviews
Winter 1991
Creation and the Courtesy of Reading
Real Presences by George Steiner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989. 236 pages. $19.95. Debates about deconstruction have been raging in the academy for nearly two decades. Though academic literary […]
Nonfiction
Summer 1979
“A Recourse Somewhat Human”: Keats’s Religion of Beauty
One of the pivotal moments in the spiritual history of our poetry occurs at Dover Beach, when “down the vast edges drear / And naked shingles of the world,” Matthew […]
Editor's Notes
Winter 1979
Editorial: The Apples of Olympia
Outside Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre there hung an emblem depicting Hercules carrying the starry sphere upon his shoulders. Hercules the human hero has taken on the task from Atlas the god, […]
In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Richard Wilbur
Richard Wilbur died last month at the age of ninety-six, still another wonderful American poet—including Derek Walcott, John Ashberry, Nancy Willard, Michael Harper, C.K. Williams, C.D. Wright, and Conrad Hilberry—whose […]
In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Derek Walcott
Just a couple weeks ago KROnline published my in memoriam for Nancy Willard, and a year ago for Michael Harper. Over the last year or two such poets as C.D. […]
In Memoriam
In Memoriam: Nancy Willard
On February 19, Nancy Willard passed away at her home in Poughkeepsie, New York, where she had lived since 1965 with her husband, the photographer Eric Lindbloom. She was eighty. […]
In Memoriam
In Memoriam:
Michael S. Harper
Forty-five years ago, just a year after Michael Harper’s amazing first book, Dear John, Dear Coltrane, was published, he came to Kenyon, like so many other young poets, to read […]
Winter 2016
On Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems by Jimmy Santiago Baca
The publication in 2014 of Jimmy Santiago Baca’s Singing at the Gates: Selected Poems was, like that of most books of poetry in America today, scarcely noticed in the larger culture and barely noted even in poetry circles.
Summer 2014
On Philip Schultz’s The Wherewithal: A Novel in Verse
Philip Schultz’s first book of poems, Like Wings, which came out in 1978, was a National Book Award nominee and was honored by an American Academy and Institute Award in Literature.