December 16, 2014
Patterns of Poetic Revolution
One of the most famous lines in English poetry about poetry is Moore’s “I, too, dislike it.” The interesting thing is just how much the best poets, historically, have […]
February 8, 2014
An Alternate Second Half of the Aeneid
A story about Virgil on his deathbed, possibly apocryphal, tells how he ordered his literary executors to destroy the Aeneid because it was imperfect; that he preferred that the poem […]
December 28, 2013
Epic Fail
The most inflated reputation in literary history came about as the result of genuine literary merit crossed with a transnational empire and language. Many people would assume I speak of […]
October 15, 2012
Albert Speer and the Berghof Omen
In Albert Speer’s Inside the Third Reich, in a chapter detailing the autumn of 1939 as Hitler prepared to invade Poland, we find the following passage. In the course of […]