Poetry is broken language. Even in its “prose” incarnations—proems, prose poems—when lineation is not formally observed, poetry works the break. It interrupts, truncates, burglarizes. Poetry ruptures and ameliorates.
Well into the wee hours, I stumbled downstairs and stretched out on an overstuffed leather couch, with several copies of the American Scholar to speed me into dreamland. And it was there that I discovered Joseph Epstein, or Aristides, as...
Though Jones was gentle about the story’s deficiencies, it was clear he was frustrated. I think this was because it was clear to him that the basics of humanity shouldn’t be that difficult to express. He spent an hour and a half going over...
The surge in the number of unaccompanied minors crossing the US border is so alarming that President Barack Obama described it as “an urgent humanitarian situation.” Following the president’s comments, the federal government announced a $2...
As a beginning writer I had a typically naïve conception of style as something added to a finished piece, as if the content is water and style the vase you pour it in—a vase that shapes and decorates but doesn’t alter the chemistry of the...
Adam Phillips’s new study, Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst, is an effective breviary and defense of Sigmund Freud, and not because it dazzles with a tightrope act of theory, but because it simply and directly underscores Freud...
From late 1933 to New Year’s Day 1935, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul with little more than Army surplus clothes, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and some empty notebooks in his rucksack.
