poetry

Who Poisoned Pablo Neruda?

by Ariel Dorfman

"In retrospect I wonder if perhaps I was so tired of tales of torture and disappearances, so full of death and grief, that I could not deal with one more affront. I preferred to shield the sacred figure of Neruda from the violence."

The Poetics and Politics of Historical Memory in Hungary

by Gábor Schein

Gábor Schein offers a "poetry of witness" for the mutilation of history in service of Hungarian nationalism. 

Between Perpetrating a Hoax and Charging One: American Politics in the Waste Land

by Jed Rasula

The centenary of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land reminds readers of the rumors that the poem was published as a hoax. While pulling off a hoax takes cleverness, invoking the word to dismiss inconvenient facts is an abdication of responsibility that plagues political culture today.

Over a River Strangely Rosy: Reading Poetry in Wartime

by Joan Neuberger

"It’s my job to explain things about Russia and its various incarnations of empire. I know how to do that — I’ve been doing it for a long time. But, in this moment, analysis seems to me to be somehow incomprehensible and profoundly unsatisfying."

Poetry and the Struggle for Justice

by Paul Lewis

"During the antebellum period, newspapers and magazines featured poems that advanced a wide range of causes, including women’s rights, peace, and temperance" – and abolition.

A Poem That Shows How to Remember the Holocaust

by James Loeffler and Leora Bilsky

"Lemkin’s anguished text also explains why the world had already begun to forget the Holocaust. Genocide represents more than a large-scale physical assault on human bodies, he suggests; it is also an attack on the very existence of minority cultures. In a genocide, books are burned and memories are extinguished."

The Poetics of Abolition

by Manu Samriti Chander

Two new books on Black literary culture in the nineteenth century cast new light on how writers imagined freedom outside of the definition created by the European enlightenment. 

Amanda Gorman's Success Stirred A Bleak Undercurrent

by Manisha Sinha

Some critical response to young poet Amanda Gorman's Inaugural reading echoes the racist dismissal and condescenscion contemporaries leveled at the founding-era work of Phillis Wheatley.

A Bold Anthology Shows How R-I-G-H-T and W-R-I-T-E Come Together in Black Poetry

The incoming director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture has published an anthology of Black American poetry that speaks to the ways that the arts and poets in particular have articulated and spread the cause of liberation. 

Shifting the Focus From Sylvia Plath’s Tragic Death to Her Brilliant Life

Heather Clark's new biography of the poet returns focus to her life and work rather than her afterlife.

Reading Pope Francis's "Fratelli Tutti" through Carl Sandburg

by Walter G. Moss

The latest encyclical by Pope Francis, calling for recognition of the unity of humanity, echoes the egalitarian humanism of the poet and writer Carl Sandburg.

Rimbaud and Verlaine: France Agonises over Digging up Gay Poets

While advocates see reinterrment at the National Mausoleum as a recognition of gay contributors to French literary history, some opponents suggest the iconoclastic poets would have rejected any such honor. 

A Memorial Day Lament for Capt. Wilfred Owen, Sgt. Joyce Kilmer, and the Needless Dead of Foolish Wars

by Walter G. Moss

The horrific scale of slaughter in the first World War can be understood, ironically, through the tragedy of a single lost life. Walter Moss considers the deaths of two poets in France.

If You Thought Byron Was Bad You Should Have Met His Family

The scandal-prone poet came from a family mired in cuckoldry, cowardice and killing.

America’s First Literary Voice

by William Lambers

The thoughts and feelings of Anne Bradstreet, written hundreds of years ago, live on with us today. 

Outrage as author Naomi Wolf stands by view of Victorian poet

At Hay festival, Wolf restated belief that John Addington Symonds was deeply affected by laws against homosexuality.

Carolyn Forché: Bearing Witness to the Wounds of History

by Robin Lindley

A Conversation with Renowned Poet and Human Rights Activist Carolyn Forché on Her New Memoir, Mass Trauma, History, and the Plight of Refugees Today.

The 'Female Byron': The celebrity poet who mesmerized a 19th-century public with hints of dark secrets

L.E.L.: The Lost Life and Scandalous Death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, the Celebrated “Female Byron” is the first biography of Landon to explore recent revelations about her life, and the literary critic Lucasta Miller’s sleuthing delivers an unexpected result. 

In a Lost Essay, a Glimpse of an Elusive Poet and Slave

George Moses Horton's “Individual Influence” is interesting not just for his lofty, abstract words about the primacy of divine influence, but for the context in which they were preserved: in a scrapbook of material relating to a prominent scholar who was forced out of the university after publicly opposing slavery.

The Walter Benjamin Brigade

by Walter Laqueur

How an obscure and maddeningly opaque German Jewish intellectual became a thriving academic industry.