poetry
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Tennyson’s Ulysses seen through Wallace Stevens’s: Prologues To What Is Possible. A perspective on the Tennysonean Ulysses
I have admired and read Wallace Stevens for years (see my appreciation of Stevens here), and just the other night, while re-reading my way through Harold Bloom’s exuberant A Map Of Misreading (1975), in which Stevens is a central figure, I took to my Complete Poetry & Prose edition of Stevens (The Library of America… Continue reading
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From Philip Levine’s: The Simple Truth (1994)
Here’s an excerpt from one of my most treasured poets, Philip Levine, and his exuberant “The Simple Truth” written in 1994, for which he won in 1995 the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Like other modern poets such as Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, James Schuyler, among others, Levine is included in Harold… Continue reading
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From Robert Lowell’s: For Lizzie And Harriet (1973)
If there is a poet with whom I find myself connected to, perhaps more so than any other poet, then it is Robert Lowell. While his Pulitzer winning books of poetry Lord Weary’s Castle (1946) and The Dolphin (1973) are best known among readers (and these are indeed magnificent works) then it is, quite consistently,… Continue reading
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Dissecting Dickinson: From Blank to Blank —
This is the third “Dissecting Dickinson” issue, for the previous two, see The Guest is gold and crimson and My wheel is in the dark! of which the links have been provided. Poem 761: From Blank to Blank — dated about 1863 is possibly one of my favourite of Dickinson’s poems, and I share Harold… Continue reading
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In Appreciation of Wallace Stevens’s Poetry
This summer I have spent in a rather mixed topography, from the picturesque, desolate, sunlit, arid deserts, to the watery, mountainous, wooded landscape; from Texas to Copenhagen, from Vienna to Sweden — from Austin’s sprawling music scene to Enchanted Rock’s stone-spotted hills; to a red-coloured, two-storey cabin in the midst of the quiet, Swedish woods;… Continue reading
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The Walt Whitman series: Song of Myself. Part 1/3
Why Whitman’s Song of Myself? There is no poem like Song of Myself. Nowhere in literary history does one find such extraordinary originality, reinvention of language, and baffling aesthetic merit as in Song of Myself. Yet, Whitman is still to this day both misunderstood and critically undervalued. This issue is part one of three issues… Continue reading
Paradiso 