Poetry analysis doesn’t have to feel overwhelming — it’s about breaking a poem into its parts and understanding how they work together to create meaning. By focusing on elements like imagery, tone, ...

“Open Form in American Poetry: Essays” by Burton Hatlen; University of Maine Press, Orono, Maine, 2021; 309 pages, hardcover, $35. In cultures with deep traditions of respect for learning, such as in ...

in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering). The kind of poetry I want gums up the works. A tangle of truths. From the outset of his career Bernstein has fought for a poetry of leaps and ...

T.S. Eliot famously observed in his great poem, “The Four Quartets,” that April is the cruelest month. Economists quote this line every year during the first two weeks of that month when referencing ...

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

This week's choice is an extract from Part Three of Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism. The whole poem runs to 744 lines, but that shouldn't put you off! It's as readable as it was 300 years ago, ...

NO ONE EXPECTED the huge response that "Can Poetry Matter?" generated, especially not its author. I wrote the essay to address -- as directly and candidly as possible -- the increasing cultural ...

One of the highlights of my first three years as a literature professor at MIT—and indeed, of my 15-year career as an educator—has been the recent discovery that some of my students, past and present, ...