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...

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...

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...

The following is a workshop and dialogue on the art of classical poetic recitation. We at The Chained Muse believe that a revival of...

Today, perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are experiencing a divide between what is considered to be the “domain” or...

The poems of Kevin Roberts (1969-2008) are indeed an anomaly among the sea of “Modernist,” “Formalist” and “Contemporary” verses that...

T.S. Eliot means many things to many different people. Like Yeats he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the academy he numbers among...

"The decline of literature indicates the decline of a nation." —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) remains...

It is absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can...

The poetry scene, like every human activity, has its cant and its catchwords. As Robert Louis Stevenson said in his Virginibus...

From the beginning of mankind’s existence, as a truly human culture, Man has struggled to express the seemingly inexpressible—the idea...

Poetry, as we have discussed in earlier parts of this article series, depends upon the Muses and accessing the deeper self or soul within...