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

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

The Two Rains On Yorkshire’s moors, on Wiltshire’s plain, On Cornwall’s sea-sprayed craggy cliffs, the rain Hangs limp, immobile, from...

If angels plucked up blossoms In endless, light-drowned skies, With curved sextuple petals Glowing radiant white, Pearlescent in noon’s...

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

The fields stretch out, bare, icy: __Wide, blank, yet-unetched slates, Tabulae rasae, waiting __The chisel of the Fates, But deep beneath...

When my time has come And helium Weighs down on my exhausted core, Spent from shedding light Through the endless night Until the fuel...

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...

O life-affirming season, mild and fair Yet bursting with life, rousing long-dulled sense, Whose spark of youth electrifies the air Heavy...

Night broods heavy, dark, and still – Its darkest, stillest hour, When the damp, dead airs chill And the starlight glows dour. I roam the...

Anyone who has ever attended a commencement ceremony in the United States has certainly heard Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” often recited...

Modernism produces obscure poetry because it denies the existence of absolute truth. Without a fundamental truth to reveal, poetry is...

When torrid Summer’s greenery, Its vibrant hues and spiced perfume Lie far, fast-fading memory, Your flowers bloom. When all the world...

Through the peace of balmy spring, Bird-songs’ trills and breeze-tossed leaves, An alien sound, a distant ring Dares to break the mirth...

Turquoise waves on shell-white sand Rush forth – crashing, crashing, crashing – Dying gladly as they land, Surging, breaking, foaming,...

In his essay “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley described a poem as “the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.” His sweeping...

In my last essay, I discussed the difference between classical and modernist poetry as a difference of worldviews. Classicism views the...

Borne from sultry jungled isles Of some far archipelago, Imprisoned in glass here. Transplanted, you yet flourish, show Your charms,...

Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more...

Geese in Flight An artless, brash, half-mournful cry Rends the languid autumn sky, A fractious chorus blaring Earthen horns, fanfaring...