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 [...]

A Survey of Verse Scribblers on the Silver Screen As Reviewed By: Kathleen Rooney If you hit the trivia section of the Internet Movie Data Base entry for Steven Spielberg’s 2002 high-tech adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s short story Minority Report, you will learn that the director “hired the top 12 contortionist [sic] from around [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In the world of American poetry, getting a call from Dana Gioia is like getting blessed by the Pope. This spring, I received that benediction when he invited me to West Chester, Pennsylvania, for the 9th Annual Conference on Exploring Form & Narrative in Poetry.  Gioia, himself a poet and critic (and now Chairman of [...]