In the mid-1990s, a series of exposés featured on the London Independent and elsewhere brought a dark secret to light. Many were startled...

The year is 1797. Eight years after the beginning of the French Revolution, all hopes which had initially been placed in this uprising...

I remembers once leafing through a volume of Allen Ginsberg's poems and coming across one poem with the word “butterfly” in it and...

Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages...

Contemporary poetry is plagued by several characteristic vices: obscurity, banality, nihilism—each a topic for examination in its own...

The impact of Leonardo’s artwork on us today reproduces an effect which he himself experienced when looking at the opening of a dark...

Robert Frost’s talent radiates best from his shorter poems. His poetic voice, naturally laconic, finds its most expressive mode in his...

At the end of part 2 of ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’, we came upon the proposition that poets either must be ‘possessed and...

Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great poets of ancient Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages...

This is Part 2 to the series on Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”. Part 1 can be found here. Chapter II: What is Poetry? The yearning for...

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is one of his shortest works, but also one of his best known, anthologized to the point of ubiquity....

An object is perfect, when everything manifold in it accords with the unity of its concept; it is beautiful, when its perfection appears...

Imagine if Dante had been given the gift, not only to peer into the twenty-first century, but to correspond with we who live in that most...

“A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” —Robert Frost To many in America, Robert Frost is the grandfatherly originator of “The...

At the end of the article – ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’ – we saw that reason obliged us to ban poetry from our republic, and...

Much has been written and read about Plato banning poets from the republic – why would he do that? The poet John Milton wrote a humorous...

So long have historians traced the beginnings of man, so long have they found the traces of art alongside him. The story of art can also...

Today, the world finds itself moving through a turbulent transformation between two systems. Collapsing at a faster rate every day are...

“So my optimism is no mild and unreasoning satisfaction. A poet once said I must be happy because I did not see the bare, cold present,...

An ode on melancholy might conjure the worst stereotypes of poetry: restless youth agonizing over imagined existential crises – a...