Poetry Book Reviews
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If I were ever to teach a class to aspiring American poets, I would have one required text: the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass. Hemingway famously wrote in The Green Hills of Africa that all modern American fiction comes from one book, Huckleberry Finn. A similar thing can be said for Walt Whitman and the 1855 edition of Leaves Read more
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“A strange land we wandered to eastern horizonsWhere blueness of mountains swam in their blue–In blue beyond name.” Robert Penn Warren is probably remembered more today as a novelist than as a poet. While it is true that he did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1946 for his famous novel All the King’s Men, he actually Read more
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At first blush, the marriage between Ovid, that most Latin of poets, and Ted Hughes would seem as unlikely a match as any you could imagine. Not in ability, of course, but in language and temperament. Hughes as a poet has always seemed to me one of the most earthy, physical, and Anglo-Saxon of all Read more
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Robert Frost is the most American of all American poets. He is American in subject, sound, and sensibility. It is his great strength and his greatest weakness. While Whitman’s propheticness transcended his American-ness, Frost can make no such claim to a transcendent universality. In the end he remains Poet Americanus. That is what makes this volume of essays Read more
ClimbingSky 