The gray trances and suspended animation of Swinburne’s poetry owes more to Baudelaire than the chintzier trappings of forbidden love, … More
Tag: modern poetry
180. (Anna Akhmatova)
Even in translations, her poems can seem such perfect instances of lyric utterance–the anchoring “I,” the impress, profound, suffocating at … More
173. (Eugenio Montale)
The final poem in La Bufera e altro, “Il sogno del prigionero,” “The Prisoner’s Dream,” is also the second poem in the … More
170. (Eugenio Montale)
A second in a series of readings of poems by Eugenio Montale, from his collection La Bufera e altro. Here, from the … More
110. (Eugenio Montale)
Montale’s best translator, William Arrowsmith, writes of the collection La Bufera e altro: “these are love-poems, both personal and cosmological, without … More
67. (Robert Lowell)
The disservice of the term “Confessional Poetry,” coined by M.L. Rosenthal in 1957 to describe not only Robert Lowell’s poetry, … More
56. (Stevie Smith)
“Her poems speak with the authority of sadness,” wrote Larkin, who might be said to aspire to the same in … More
39. (Thom Gunn)
Although I assume he has a host of them, I have not met a devoted admirer of Thom Gunn’s poetry. … More
Critical Provisions 