303. (Charles Baudelaire)

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

300. (Emily Dickinson)

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

296. (William Wordsworth)

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

285. (Emily Dickinson)

She is metaphysical in that her poetry seeks to resolve, and is a novel means for resolving, a fundamental tension … More

264. (Thomas Hardy)

To make some attempt at getting at what Hardy’s poems grasp, I’ll look at one of the most famous later … More

260. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge)

Among the defining conventions of Romanticism–the era of poetry that we, these days, might be seeing an end of–is the … More

254. (William Makepeace Thackeray)

Thackeray’s Vanity Fair doubles that charge: the novel is braced by a simultaneous awareness of Regency and Victorian foibles, of … More

224. (Emily Dickinson)

In this third and last in a series of posts on Emily Dickinson and decorum, I’ll try to bring decorum … More

223. (Emily Dickinson)

To begin with recapitulation and self-remonstration: poetry must, in F.H. Bradley’s persuasive formulation, get within the judgment the condition of … More

221. (John Keats)

This post is the first in a series of evolving sketches on “decorum” in poetry; it leads into the next … More