poetry

• 
• SOURCE: CNN
  2/1/2021
  

  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.

• 
• SOURCE: Smithsonian
  11/17/2020
  

  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. 

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  10/27/2020
  

  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.

• 
• 10/25/2020
  

  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.

• 
• SOURCE: BBC
  9/25/2020
  

  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. 

• 
• 5/24/2020
  

  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.

• 
• SOURCE: The Times
  4/6/2020
  

  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.

• 
• 3/6/2020
  

  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. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Guardian
  5/25/19
  

  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.

• 
• 5/12/19
  

  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.

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  Accessed 3/5/19
  

  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. 

• 
• SOURCE: NYT
  9-25-17
  

  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.

• 
• SOURCE: Mosaic Magazine
  4-3-14
  

  The Walter Benjamin Brigade

  by Walter Laqueur

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

• 
• SOURCE: NY Review of Books
  3-20-14
  

  Auden's secret revealed

  by Edward Mendelson

  "I learned about it mostly by chance."

• SOURCE: Guardian (UK)
  3-27-13
  

  WWI poem wins UK poetry award

  A poem inspired by her late mother's stories of the first world war, which has drawn comparisons with Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, has won the poetry journal Agenda's editor Patricia McCarthy the National Poetry Competition.McCarthy, who has published several poetry collections of her own, beat 13,040 other entries to win the anonymously-judged prize. Her winning poem, "Clothes that escaped the Great War", tells of the plodding carthorse who would take boys away to war, and then return, later, with just their clothes. "These were the most scary, my mother recalled: clothes / piled high on the wobbly cart, their wearers gone," writes McCarthy.

• SOURCE: BBC News
  2-26-13
  

  Lost Rudyard Kipling poems published

  More than 50 unpublished poems by Rudyard Kipling have been discovered by a US scholar.Thomas Pinney found the manuscripts in a number of places including a Manhattan House that was being renovated and among the papers of a former head of the Cunard Line.Pinney described it as a "tremendously exciting time for scholars and fans".The poems will be published alongside 1,300 others in the first ever complete edition of Kipling's verse on 7 March...

• SOURCE: Telegraph (UK)
  2-6-13
  

  Revealed: the only known poem by an adult Winston Churchill

  The wartime leader was an unrivalled speechwriter, prolific author and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, but despite being a lover of poetry, he was only known to have written one poem, as a schoolboy at Harrow.Now a 10-verse poem penned over two pages in blue crayon by Churchill while he was serving in the army has emerged for sale at auction in London.The poem is a rousing celebration of the British Empire and of going to war to defend her, and describes anxious sailors and marines ahead of a battle. It is said to have been influenced by Kipling and Tennyson....