305. (Lucille Clifton)

To my eyes and ears, the single greatest post-1960s American poet is Lucille Clifton. She is as essentially a lyric … More

304. (Harriet Jacobs)

Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a remarkable work of one of the few (only?) … More

William Empson thought Tennyson’s “Flower in the crannied wall” an example of a poem whose supreme simplicity must nonetheless weld … More

Of the many wonderful poems by Baudelaire is “La Squelette laboureur,” available in a number of translations online: Le Squelette … More

Lorine Niedecker’s poems are taut as riddles. Here is “Easter”: A robin stood by my porch and side-eyed raised … More

Yvor Winters, who was as intense in his conviction of Dickinson’s greatness as any could be, thought “There’s a certain … More

Mary Sidney is among the greatest Elizabethan poets in English, her translations of the psalm an achievement of a style … More

John Donne’s “Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day” is one of the most beautiful poems in English. Below is a discussion … More

Geoffrey Hill’s The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin takes as its subject and condition the inverse of a … More

So much poetry is, on the surface even, about responses and responsibility, that it is possible to understand it as … More