If we take Andrew Marvell’s Damon the Mower as an avatar for the poet himself, there is something peculiar in … More
Category: 16th and 17th Centuries
259. (John Dryden)
It seems necessary that, if poetry is not to effect synthesis by way of the elaborate similes and coaxed metaphors … More
258. (John Dryden)
For John Dryden, the world tends towards fusion and confusion and it is for the poet to establish distinctions and … More
228. (John Donne)
Among the tissues of judgments that compose a poem will be a judgment about what a poem plays at doing … More
192. (Mary Sidney)
Renaissance translations of the Psalms are maybe the closest English poetry comes to what we encounter in the religious paintings … More
189. (William Shakespeare)
The experiences of time, from its swelling (the remove from the court in As You Like It) and contracting time (Richard II; … More
178. (John Dryden)
Since both are masters of the heroic couplet, both scathing satirists, how, it might be asked, does Dryden achieve effects … More
146. (John Milton)
Reading Paradise Lost with a student, the chance to see more than before, vicariously through fresh eyes, has been most thrillingly felt … More
137. (William Shakespeare)
The recent National Theatre production of Hamlet, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, opens in Hamlet’s bedroom, where the prince sits, playing old records … More
130. (Thomas Traherne)
I was introduced to Traherne by Keith Waldrop; Waldrop was teaching a seminar in Restoration Literature, in which, with lasting … More
