405. (Lord Byron)

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

404. (T.S. Eliot)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“He was a poet of misconceptions (the title of one of his poems), of failures, of abortive lives and loves,…

Keats’ “The Eve of St Agnes” places an unusual strain upon Keats’ distinct genius, while also offering it an opportunity…