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 […]
August 1, 2018
When Things Fall Apart: Leadership in Desperate Times
I’ve been thinking about the connection between literature, politics, and leadership because I gave a talk, “When Things Fall Apart: Leadership in Desperate Times,” in James M. Van Wyck’s terrific […]
October 15, 2016
Bob Dylan Won the Nobel Prize [!/?]
Learning of Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize in Literature this week, I found myself observing, as if from a great distance, the point that the Committee was making (oral and […]
April 2, 2016
Sound and Sensibility: or, How to Make Some Noise
My old high school French workbook carried the title Son et sens, or something very close to that, while my English textbook, in an odd coincidence, was called Sound and […]
October 29, 2013
The Twenty-Year Rule
Just as there is a sharp division between a 19th century Yeats (the “Celtic Twilight” material) and a deliberately developed, 20th century Yeats (the “Byzantine” Yeats of the more […]
August 13, 2013
Tangent on a Line by John Burgon
Consider the one-hit-wonder nature of some lines, poems, and poets. Like the famous description of “A rose-red city half as old as time,” which comes from the now-forgotten sonnet […]
January 7, 2013
Shakespeare’s Mystical Rhyme: On “The Phoenix and the Turtle”
For a writer frequently claimed to represent or comprehend all of human experience, there is remarkably little theology, mysticism, or overt religiosity in Shakespeare. We have his audience to thank […]