242. (W.H. Auden)

The conundrum of Auden’s poetry—the conundrum of how to compare its aims and achievements to those of his contemporaries and … More

209. (Marcel Proust)

From the “Proust and Other Matters” blog, a debate from an old Yahoo Proust listserv, over the name of “Cambremer,” … More

The Poetry Foundation’s website has a brief essay on Montale, helpful mostly for its generous quotations from critics and … More

Friday morning, stuck in Pound’s forty-seventh canto, a student (precocious, ambitious reader) broke me free from the jam(b) I was in: … More

Robert Graves’ poetry riddles as other poets of his era do not, and this because his poems set themselves in … More

Italo Svevo, whose talent was recognized and whose career was partially rescued by Joyce, is not much read nowadays. Joyce’s … More

All poetry orients itself, to knowledge, to others, to the world or something beyond it; Eliot’s poetry stoically queries and … More

Willa Cather invented a new sort of novel, as innovative as anything by her modernist peers, and distinguished from theirs … More

V.S. Pritchett, introducing his edition of the Oxford Book of Short Stories, admits that he admires D.H. Lawrence most as a … More