Poetry
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The Sensitive Young Meme March 12, 2025
One of the most beautiful paintings in the Caspar David Friedrich show The Soul of Nature, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art through May 11, shows a roiling ocean crashing against a rocky coast by moonlight. The tiny figure of a monk stares o...
Born on a Day When God Was Ill March 12, 2025
The myth of César Vallejo, the Peruvian poet and hero of the avant-garde, precedes him. He’s the ailing hero of Roberto Bolaño’s Monsieur Pain (1984; translation 2010), a mystery novel in which a larger-than-life writer is attacked by a sudden bout o...
Lady Gaga Sounds Like Herself Again March 12, 2025
The anxiety of influence, a phrase that the literary critic Harold Bloom coined in 1973 to describe the struggle to write innovative poetry, lives on today in the form of reheated nachos. In internet slang, to reheat someone else’s nachos is to take ...
A Powerless Form March 07, 2025
The Australian writer Jessica Zhan Mei Yu and I spent several months exchanging emails about her 2023 novel, But the Girl, and the affinities between postcritique and contemporary fiction. We first met in 2019 when I was giving a talk at the Universi...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
Where Hannah Arendt Began March 04, 2025
Buried deep in Hannah Arendt’s archives in the Library of Congress are two typed and handbound books of verse—short, expressive, and written by Arendt herself. Few know that Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher responsible for the dense pr...
Ronald Johnson’s American Romanticism February 27, 2025
Even those of us who enjoy Ralph Waldo Emerson will apologize for his poetry. His essays—most of which began as lectures—are erudite but predominantly concerned with honesty and connection....
Tradition and the Individual Talent February 13, 2025
In English writing we seldom speak of tradition, though we occasionally apply its name in deploring its absence. We cannot refer to “the tradition” or to “a tradition”; at most, we employ the adjective in saying that the poetry of So-and-so is “tradi...
Tove Ditlevsen’s Worn-Out Language February 11, 2025
While I write this, my husband is cycling through the rain, taking our one-year-old son, who last night yet again wouldn’t sleep, to nursery school, and I am thinking of Tove Ditlevsen’s poems. I, too, want to write lists of my quirks, vices, unattra...
Moderation as Pursuit of Justice February 04, 2025
There are perhaps no more cited words of poetry, at least poetry of a genuinely high order, than the opening stanza of W. B. Yeats’s haunting 1919 poem “The Second Coming.” There the Irish poet evokes a true apocalypse where “Things fall apart; the c...
Only Bad Poems Go Viral February 04, 2025
It all starts with a photo on my timeline: a page of lightly stuccoed paper, uneven lines of text cascading across its surface like fault lines before an earthquake. Before I even read the poem, I notice the metrics. Thousands of likes—accompanied by...
Walking the Fault Line January 29, 2025
In the summer of 1790, William Wordsworth set off on a walking tour of nearly 3,000 miles across revolutionary France, over the Swiss Alps into Italy, then north through Germany before boarding a boat up the Rhine back to England, where he arrived la...
Literature & Magic: The Marriage of Word and Image January 22, 2025
Is literature the same as writing? The historian would say “yes.” Out of the song cycles and ritual performances of an oral culture, the discriminated genres of poetry and prose—epic, dramatic, lyric—accompanied the development of a literate culture....
Pasolini and the Permanent Present January 16, 2025
One of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s remarkable early accomplishments was the long poem that lent its title to his 1961 collection of poetry, La Religione del mio tempo, or “The Religion of My Time.” And while religion was many things to Pasolini, what he wa...
The Happiest of the Poets January 15, 2025
W. B. Yeats’s association with the English designer, poet, and socialist William Morris lasted from 1887 to 1890, during which time the young Irish poet attended Sunday lectures Morris delivered to a group of mostly self-educated workingmen and would...
For the Love of the Word January 15, 2025
Hannah Arendt first fled the Nazis in 1933. It was a harrowing escape: she had just been released from the Gestapo prison in Berlin after eight days of interrogation for collecting evidence of German anti-Semitism from the stacks of the Prussian Stat...
The Joy of Poetry January 09, 2025
In 2003, when results came in for the 2002 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (sppa), Dana Gioia took action. The survey was designed by the National Endowment for the Arts, where Gioia served as chairman from 2003 to 2009; the Census Bureau ...
Alan Hollinghurst’s Elegy for Britain January 08, 2025
It is hard to think of another living writer who produces structures as ebullient and dirigiblelike as Alan Hollinghurst does. His first novel, The Swimming-Pool Library (1988), depicts London streets, tube stops, pubs, and gym locker rooms as an inf...
Why Is the Right Obsessed With Epic Poetry? January 07, 2025
In September 2023, the richest man in the world was daydreaming about the Trojan War. “I sometimes wonder if perhaps Rome was started by exiles from Troy,” Elon Musk wrote on X, the social media platform he had bought and swiftly renamed. His thought...
Poets on the Best Poems They Read in 2024 December 27, 2024
In the sea of endless year-end lists, poetry often seems to get sidelined, or forgotten—or maybe the critics and listmakers just aren’t reading enough poetry in the first place. Which made me wonder—what were the poets themselves reading this year? S...
The Poet Is Present December 17, 2024
Poets have accumulated many labels throughout history. Some are not so flattering—Plato saw them as liars and demanded their exile from his precious utopia. Others glimpse, in the role of the poet, something closer to the sacred: Emerson called them ...
On Hannah Arendt's 'What Remains' December 09, 2024
For much of her life, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, best known today for The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her reporting and reflections on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, wrote poetry that it seems she never thought to publish. ...
The Best Books of 2024 December 05, 2024
Each week, our editors and critics recommend the most captivating, notable, brilliant, thought-provoking, and talked-about books. Now, as 2024 comes to an end, we’ve chosen a dozen essential reads in nonfiction and a dozen, too, in fiction and poetry...
On Taking Things Slow December 05, 2024
I would describe your book, The Champ Is Here, as a series of loosely linked anecdotes about life in a small town. I’m curious about how you conceptualize it—do you see it as a novel, prose poetry, a short story collection? Do those labels even matte...
A Conversation with Emmalea Russo December 03, 2024
Poet and novelist Emmalea Russo exists on my Instagram as a wild-haired, tattooed practitioner of the occult who sometimes wears a party dress, sometimes carries a pitchfork, and lives in the green world outside our urban spaces. In the past year, sh...
