275. (Charles Baudelaire)

There’s much agreement that he speaks to and of a modern malaise like no other poet. He seems, at times, … More

274. (Charles Baudelaire)

All poetry is nature poetry—imagining what it is in the nature of things to do and become; nature is the … More

Even if Baudelaire’s lyrics are accepted as a symptom of modernity (but what great poetry written in the 19th century … More

The gray trances and suspended animation of Swinburne’s poetry owes more to Baudelaire than the chintzier trappings of forbidden love, … More

“Self-accusation,” writes Geoffrey Hill, “is the life-blood of Romanticism.” For a long time, I thought Lowell a late-Romantic, working back, … More

Whatever else its relationship to genre, wit is a particular way of coping with the world’s fragility, its tendency to … More

When T.S. Eliot, in his essay on Andrew Marvell, offered his incomparably confusing characterization of “wit,” what was he onto? … More

Among the etchings on display at the MFA’s recent Goya exhibit, one from the series of Caprichos depicts an old woman, sat … More

Robert Lowell’s 1961 Imitations did more for the reputation of twentieth-century poets Mandelstam and Montale than it did for the … More