Mr. Bottum is the author of eight books, including ‘An Anxious Age’ and ‘The…
In the current cultural climate, the act of revisiting the poetic tradition with sympathy seems almost revolutionary.
Australia Day has been a source of contention for the implied assumption that until 1788, Australia was a blank slate of a continent, empty and unpeopled, undiscovered by anyone until the British landed there.
Herman Melville’s method here seems far more akin to Marianne Moore’s 20th-century process than to anything produced in the 19th century by a Longfellow or a Whittier, or even a Whitman.
Lord Byron pictures himself as old, still capable of desire but no longer an object of others’ desire. The fire and the drive that pulls him out of aging languor is freedom for Greece.
As a general rule, Whitman’s lines generate their poetic rhythm, urgency, and cohesion not through regular patterns of meter, but via patterns of repetition and the breaking of those patterns.
Joseph Blanco White wrote some now mostly forgotten poetry, but this sonnet, orginally dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, should not be allowed to fade away.
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