About James Matthew Wilson

III   O early ripe! To thy abundant store What could advancing age have added more? It might (what nature never gives the young) Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue.                                         —John Dryden  We stood in a living room furnished with antiques and, on small tables winging the brocaded sofa, delicately fanned displays [...]

II          Marble staircases climb the hills where derelict estates               glimmer in the river-brightened dusk . . .               And some are merely left to rot where now               broken stone lions guard a roofless colonnade . . .                                                 —Dana Gioia   Though long anticipated, the recent demise of the respectable Edge City Review [...]

While arguing amid the colonnades, Tired in the noon-day by the badly taught, Or resting, dubious, in the laurel shades   I have impinged upon a firmer thought.    – Yvor Winters Poet-critics from David Lehman to William Logan have aired their complaints about the dangers literature faces in the contemporary English Department, and they have done [...]

Travel Writing and the Canon Like many odd literary creatures from the British 1930’s, W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice’s Letters from Iceland (1936) is referred to more frequently as a representative period piece than as an achieved work of art. As Tim Youngs notes, in his essay on Auden’s travel writing in the recent Cambridge [...]

Reviewed: 100 Essential Modern Poems. Joseph Parisi, Ed. Ivan R. Dee, 2006. We have been in the age of the anthology for more than a century now, and nothing suggests we are about to leave it. Our lives and civilization have been built upon miscellanies and compilations: inspired ones, like the Bible, and more modest [...]

Note: “The Slow Pacific Swell” may be found in many volumes of Winters’s work, including Collected Poems (1960); The Poetry of Yvor Winters (1978); and The Selected Poems of Yvor Winters (1999).   In her introduction to one of two recent editions of Yvor Winters’ selected poems, Helen Pinkerton Trimpi offers “To the Holy Spirit” [...]

I  Early in 1941, as British forces were pushing Italian tanks back into Libya and spoiling Mussolini’s dreams of becoming a full member to the Axis powers, Ezra Pound was hard at work in Rapallo, pushing dreams of his own. In a letter from January 2nd of that year, Pound wrote to the retired Spanish [...]