poetry
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Fernando Pessoa’s (unpublished) play: The Duke of Parma
It was around 1909, according to biographer Richard Zenith, that Pessoa wrote the first pages of passages and scribbled fragmented notes for his five-act play, “The Duke of Parma: A tragedy.” Which, if it sounds rather Shakespearean, was supposed to be just that. According to Zenith: “It is one of the largest and weirdest of… Continue reading
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From Alvin Feinman’s: Corrupted Into Song (1990)
Alvin Feinman may very well be one of the most underrated, yet powerful, modern poets I have had the pleasure of reading. I found Feinman—not wholly unsurprisingly—through Prof. Harold Bloom, whose The Western Canon, Anxiety of Influence, How to Read Poetry, among many other works, I have read and still reread incessantly. Few critics (and… Continue reading
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Rainer Marie Rilke: Song of the Sea
I have finally taken to reading Rilke’s poetry in German, by no means an easy task, as I am still very much in the infancy of learning the language. Nevertheless, having studied German for long enough to be able to read Kafka and Mann, and being fortunate enough to have a partner whose mother tongue… Continue reading
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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 the 1995 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Like other modern poets such as Wallace Stevens, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell and 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, perhaps more so than any other, 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), it is, quite consistently, his ‘For Lizzie and Harriet’… 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 Dickinson 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 that… Continue reading
The Western Canon 