Among those brilliant readers and critics, Johnson, Coleridge, Eliot, and Empson, the primary engine of productivity, whether in marginalia, publications, … More

Approached from the direction of monumentality, The Waste Land calls for the literary historian: the poem is a post-Romantic attempt … More

“My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow” has become one of my favorite poems by Robert Lowell and one that … More

            Aristotle, frustrating some, claims that “a life of virtue is a life of flourishing.” The statement can be variously … More

Paule Marshall’s debut novel, Brown Girl, Brownstones is one of the best American novels of the mid-twentieth century. When Marshall … More

William Empson on the foundation of humanism: “the world is good enough for me; let me be good enough for … More

Robert Lowell is a genius of scale, disproportion, and incongruity; from the earliest poetry, the most intensely Catholic, he developed … More

Kafka’s The Trial takes as its subject matter the disenchantment of turn-of-the-century bourgeois modernity; but it presents, in what it … More