January 2, 2015
When Goethe Met Napoleon
During Napoleon’s 1808 campaign in Germany, he visited his favorite author, Goethe. The two giants of the age met twice, once at Weimar and once at Erfurt. Andrew Roberts’s […]
October 31, 2013
Carl Phillips and the Post-Epic: Thoughts on Double Shadow
If someone asked me to guess what it might be like to read the translated papyri of a failed, pre-modern dystopia, I’d tell them to read Carl Phillips’s Double Shadow. […]
April 23, 2012
The Two Unsurpassable Poems in the English Language
Every successful poem is unsurpassable in its own way. Even a brief rhyme, like— John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone. —cannot be improved upon, repeated, or replicated. It is a […]
March 7, 2012
Notes on Capital-T Tragedy
1. Why it started with the Greeks and showed up again with the Elizabethans. What makes a tragedy tragic—as opposed to a story with a sad ending—is that the sufferer […]