I...would say with W.H. Auden, "writers are not passive recipients of good fortune, art is a vocation for which a price must be paid.  ...

Jonathan Edwards’ apocalyptic sermons voice human terror of obliteration in our lonely and inexplicable cosmos.  He exhorts us to turn from ...

The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at ...

As a poet, I may very possibly be more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness ...

When Dickinson loses her housekeeper, who quit to get married, she writes that she really misses the maid—a common enough statement—but then...

     To use Vico's terminology, the metaphor is delightful because "it is more known by the hearer than presented by the speaker....

Picasso is a born chef d’école. His is one of the most inventive minds in Europe. Invention is as clearly his supreme gift as sensibility is...

Art has always two antithetical faces, a medal where one side, for example, would resemble Paul Rembrandt and the other side, Jacques Callot...

If almost insensible changes in our moral sensibility take place over time, we perceive them only in the long run (as it is only in 1972 tha...

I will be examining how the poet’s strange imagined relation with a listener who is invisible—either because he is divine, or because he exi...

Jacob "fleeced" his brother Esau by pulling the wool over their father's eyes.  Jacob had followed his twin Esau into the worl...

The kind of poems that manifest musical properties, but are intended to be read or spoken, not sung. They are by and large brief, rarely exc...

That's the way it goes. For many weeks you have been exploring what seemed to be a profitable way of doing. You discovered that there w...

It's just the same as when you feel a joke coming. You see somebody coming down the street that you're accustomed to abuse, and you ...

There is a moment in the life of Rimbaud when he comes to realize that he is a poet, but that it is not his fault. He writes: “It is wrong t...