407. (Jim Powell)

Jim Powell, in the final section of Substrate, itself titled “Substrate,” presents us with moments of apprehending persons from … More

406. (Christopher Marlowe)

T.S. Eliot’s criticism of Marlowe is essential: Dido appears to be a hurried play, perhaps done to order with the … More

I sometimes wish every long poem could exasperate like Paradise Lost or The Aeneid, since the exasperation of either is … More

Criticism has one basic task: to explain what is justifiably, rightly extraordinary in a work of literature. This involves making … More

Surfaces are the occasion of Stevens’ poetry; so obvious a statement for a poet among whose best early poems is … More

The obvious question to ask about Jim Powell’s second collection of poems, Substrate, published twenty five years after the first, … More

How to explain the presence of Baudelaire as a defining presence for modernist poetry in English? He is felt, directly … More

I’ve tried to work out, in the last five posts, how it is that the most remarkable “Romance” narrative poems … More

The first time we encounter the parenthetical “(Men sell not such in any town),” we might want to hear the … More

In this series of posts, I proposed to myself to read the best short narrative poems from the nineteenth century. … More