A Close Reading of Two Contemporary Indian Poets As Reviewed By: Ravi Shankar The world’s largest secular democracy has been exporting its letters in English for a few literary generations, but in the wake of a few luminaries—Rabindranath Tagore or more recently, Arundhati Roy—many strident, lyrical voices have gone unrecognized (after all, this wave of [...]

By: Stephen Schwartz This is an intensely personal, and elliptical, and non-Aristotelian story. As a young man I looked for a poem, afraid I could not find it. And even after I found it, I kept looking. I was told by a distinguished Brazilian “concrete poet,” who visited California but whose name I have forgotten: some poems [...]

By: Stephen Schwartz On March 7, the North American poet Philip Lamantia, the only successful English-language versifier in the French surrealist style to appear in this hemisphere, died of heart failure in San Francisco, his native city, at 77. Lamantia was also a pioneer in the use of hallucinogenic drugs by intellectuals in the United [...]

A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania (Part II) As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz II. Modern Bosnian literature As should be seen throughout the present essay, translation is a difficult art, especially when dealing with poets from a cultural context so different from ours, as North Americans. The challenge of translation was recently [...]

A Personal Survey of Modern Verse in Ex-Yugoslavia and Albania As Reviewed By: Stephen Schwartz I will begin this highly selective and idiosyncratic discussion of modern Slovene, Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian, and Albanian poetry with an anecdote. While barely known in the West, this episode represents the first penetration, in the form of an exclusively personal relationship, [...]

By: Jan Schreiber The task of the critic is judgment. I hope to unravel the complexities of judgment, as it applies to works of literature, and specifically to poetry. Those who imagine judgment to be a simple matter need only perform a small exercise to convince themselves otherwise. In the fourth act of Macbeth, Malcolm [...]

Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: a Novel-in-verse. Vintage Books, 1998. 149 pages Evaristo, Bernardine. The Emperor’s Babe: a Verse Novel of Londinium, 211 A.D. Penguin, 2001. 253 pages. Graham, Loren. Mose. Wesleyan UP, 1994. 52 pages. Leithauser, Brad. Darlington’s Fall: a Novel-in-verse. Knopf, 2002. 313 pages. Maxwell, Glyn. Time’s Fool: a Tale in Verse. Houghton [...]

By: Justin Quinn The main transformations in American literature over the last thirty years have had a strong effect on poetry as well: the consolidation of African-American writers, the emergence of Native-American, Asian-American and Chicano writers, as well as gay writers, to name but a few. Most of this falls under the rubric of “multiculturalism”, [...]

Ledbury Poetry Festival, July 2004 By: Anthony Moore I wish Edward Thomas (that poet) were here to ponder gulfs in general with me as in the days when he and I tired the sun with talking on the footpaths and stiles of Ledington and Ryton (Robert Frost, “A Romantic Chasm”) Those days, at the start [...]

By: Paul Lake In 1935 in his essay “Religion and Literature,” T. S. Eliot described his era as one in which readers had “never heard the Christian faith spoken of as anything but an anachronism.” He further declared, “ . . . the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism . . [...]