April 13, 2019
Review: Rabindranath Tagore, Selected Poems
Tagore, Rabindranath. Selected Poems. Translated by William Radice. Penguin Modern Classics (India), 208 pages. Some writers write different things the same way over and over again. All of Emily […]
January 4, 2014
Esoteric and Exoteric: On Dickinson and Shakespeare
When I go back into my own archives—old floppy disks, ancient dot-matrix printouts off an Apple II GS—I find that my earliest poetry (written in my mid-teens) falls into two […]
June 3, 2013
On the Approaching 100th Anniversary of Tagore’s Nobel Prize
To understand Tagore, we 21st-century readers must expand our notion of what a “writer” is and does. No writer, Indian or American, is to his or her country what […]
July 22, 2012
American Poetry Critics and Literary Memory
The poetry critic of the New York Times, David Orr, gives us a capsule overview of “novelist-poets” in a July 20th article: “The club of novelist-poets is distinguished but […]
May 10, 2012
Victor Hugo and the Two Tolstoys
One of the keys to Tolstoy is his early admiration of Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables. The young Tolstoy visited Hugo during a trip to Europe; the young Russian Count read and […]