304. (Harriet Jacobs)

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

303. (Alfred Lord Tennyson)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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