The Original Ladies of Letters
A new book by Elizabeth Scott-Baumann examines the female poets and literary critics who challenged seventeenth-century England’s male literary establishment.
Joan Smith
· 17 min read
Poetry
A collection of 45 posts
A Subterranean Celebration
How the 6 Gallery reading in San Francisco on 7 October 1955 changed the counterculture.
David S. Wills
· 13 min read
Whatever Happened to Light Verse?
A paean to a disappearing and misunderstood literary tradition.
Kevin Mims
· 21 min read
The End of War Poetry
Among literary forms, war poetry is unusual for having enjoyed a universally acknowledged and tightly defined golden age.
Simon Evans
· 9 min read
Oscar Wilde’s Utopia
The great conflict within the Left during the 19th century was between anarchist and statist visions for socialism (this was the bone of contention between Bakunin and Marx, and for many revolutionaries long after).
Jared Marcel Pollen
· 11 min read
R.M. Vaughan (1965–2020): A Beautiful Mind Silently Extinguished in a Time of Fear
We were Oscar Wilde’s great-grand-nephews, dandy aesthetes obsessed as much with the curl of our hair as with art or politics.
Sky Gilbert
· 8 min read
The Misguided Campaign Against Journalistic Objectivity
Even historians, who have many years to consider the object of their study, inhabit “the twilight of probability.” How can those journalists tasked with writing “history’s first draft” imagine that they know which way true “harm” lies?
Lorraine Clark
· 7 min read
‘Things You Should Be Aware Of’: A Pandemic Prose Poem
It’s more important to fight racism than to stop the spread of the disease.
Stephen Elliott
· 5 min read
The Million-Petalled Flower
He had the gift of producing them by inverting or adapting cliché to give it new life.
Andrew Gleeson
· 15 min read
In Praise of Sylvia Plath's Forgotten (Sorority) Sister
A tragic early death can do wonders for a writer’s reputation. On October 27, Google dedicated its search page to the late Sylvia Plath, who would have turned 87 that day, had she not taken her own life, at the age of 30, back in 1963. It seems unlikely
Kevin Mims
· 8 min read
Headline Rhymes
Graham Verdon
· 1 min read
Headline Rhymes
Graham Verdon
· 1 min read
Headline Rhymes
Graham Verdon
· 1 min read
Headline Rhymes
Graham Verdon
· 1 min read
George Faludy: Hungarian Poet and Hero for Our Times
Faludy’s greatest weapon—what really allows him to swat away the mosquitoes of passing ideologies—is his delight in sensual pleasures.
Robin Ashenden
· 6 min read