T.S. Eliot: Ash Wednesday
Today is Ash Wednesday and although I did not want to provide a reading of a long poem for some time, I thought not posting on T.S. Eliot’s Ash Wednesday (1930) would be a lost opportunity. Below is a...
View ArticleGerard Manley Hopkins: The Windhover
Last night I returned to Manhattan from a long weekend in Vermont. I struggled to drift off to sleep because of an indelible image of a stately bird of prey high in the bare boughs of a tree against a...
View ArticleRobert Frost: Spring Pools
Not uncommon to the northeast, our weather has been rather erratic this year. A week or so ago I walked through the park in a long-sleeve and today I’ve become something of a frigophobic. In any...
View ArticleWallace Stevens: Of Modern Poetry
The question of the appeal of modern poetry is a very big concern among modernists and a common question among readers new to the genre. Many prefer the aesthetics of the Elizabethan’s, enjoying the...
View ArticleW.B. Yeats: The Fascination of What’s Difficult
William Butler Yeats, Irish poet I want to continue with the idea of modern difficulty but first, a digression. In my previous post I mentioned the irony inherent in W.H. Auden’s elegy to William...
View ArticleJohn Ashbery: A Madness to Explain
I’ve put a moratorium on my thoughts for the past few weeks for several reasons. That being said, today’s post is the culmination of a much-needed rupture in the mental pressure vessel and a consistent...
View ArticleStanley Kunitz: The Testing-Tree
I haven’t dreamed in months. My brain is numb with thinking, burned-out, gutted. I wake each morning to only the hoary, fragmented recollection of the pages I was reading before I fell into sleep,...
View ArticleEmily Dickinson and the Neurology of Reading
The intricacy of the process of reading as well as the effect it has on us as individuals is only just beginning to be understood. Instruments of medical imaging are getting finer and finer and...
View ArticleHart Crane’s “Voyages II”
Lately I have been bogged down in my thesis. I have delighted in my work on the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats but I am also constantly called back to the Modernist. (I use the capital ‘M’ to signify...
View ArticleWhat Makes Walt Whitman Whitmanian?
Throughout my readings, I have mentioned Walt Whitman with sweeping, vague references to his eminence and looming spirit. Sweeping because deeming something Whitmanian suffices as analytical synecdoche...
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