T.S. Eliot famously observed in his great poem, “The Four Quartets,” that April is the cruelest month. Economists quote this line every year during the first two weeks of that month when referencing ...

in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering). The kind of poetry I want gums up the works. A tangle of truths. From the outset of his career Bernstein has fought for a poetry of leaps and ...

NO ONE EXPECTED the huge response that "Can Poetry Matter?" generated, especially not its author. I wrote the essay to address -- as directly and candidly as possible -- the increasing cultural ...

In Glück’s second book of essays (after Proofs and Theories), she carefully considers the makeup of the American aesthetic as a doctor would diagnose a patient. She begins with pragmatism, noting that ...

Just choose your calamity – the sweeping, righteous, indignant tone of the Poetical Essay on the Existing State of Things will chime with it Do the early efforts of a great writer have the glimmerings ...

One of the highlights of my first three years as a literature professor at MIT—and indeed, of my 15-year career as an educator—has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, ...