James Matthew Wilson is a poet, literary critic, and professor of humanities and Augustinian traditions at Villanova University. He contributed essays and reviews to The Weekly Standard between 2014 and 2017, covering poetry, literature, and academic culture. He is the author of several poetry collections and works of literary criticism.
Until his death on October 14, Richard Wilbur had spent nearly half a century as America’s greatest living poet. A writer of opulent forms and playful wit, whose rhymed and measured stanzas combined the intellectual complexities of modernist verse with the familiar pleasures of an older tradition,…
To read the second and final stanza of Catherine Chandler’s “Chasubles”—“Summer’s a smiling charlatan / camouflaged in green / where violet truths lie mantled in / the seen and the unseen”—one might think American religious poetry is now much as it was in Emily Dickinson’s day. The reclusive maid…
When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…
When Sir Gawain and the Green Knight first appeared in print, in 1839, its wintry world of Christian revelry, chivalric honor, and Arthurian romance had long since vanished. Indeed, that world, or rather, medieval romantic literature as a whole, was antiquated even at the time the poem was written,…
Modern thinking about love tries to tame it: to exclude its elements of risk, self-abandon, and its challenges to self-transcendence. It seeks to demythologize love’s dimensions of wonder and gratitude so that they are reduced to problems to be diagnosed with a medical vocabulary and managed by…
"I don't believe in ghosts that come rattling to your bedside," says the Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in this haunting new book. "Because truth is I live with one."
"I don't believe in ghosts that come rattling to your bedside," says the Canadian photojournalist Paul Watson in this haunting new book. "Because truth is I live with one."
On March 25, 1300, a 35-year-old Florentine poet and politician set out on a long journey afoot in search of redemption. His destination was the eternal city. The poet in question, of course, was Dante Alighieri, and the city was not heaven, but Rome.
On March 25, 1300, a 35-year-old Florentine poet and politician set out on a long journey afoot in search of redemption. His destination was the eternal city. The poet in question, of course, was Dante Alighieri, and the city was not heaven, but Rome.
Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected "Metaphysical Song."
Over seven decades, Helen Pinkerton has published a small number of poems admirable for their austere intellectual beauty, such as the newly collected “Metaphysical Song."
A.M. Juster is the pseudonym of a long-suffering Washington civil servant whose posts included a humorless tenure as commissioner of Social Security during two administrations. No wonder, then, that his secret life as a poet has the character of a release valve. Apart from his first short…
In the closing pages of Yvor Winters’s Forms of Discovery (1968), the great poet and critic offers measured praise of the work of one of his former students. In Catherine Davis's best poems, "the matter is serious" and "the style is impeccable." Winters had long argued that poetry was an…
In the years before his death in 1974, John Crowe Ransom was frequently mentioned in the same breath as T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and Robert Frost as one of the great American poets of the 20th century. Ransom himself knew that this was an overly generous association; his reputation was founded…
Half of Wyatt Prunty’s ninth volume of poetry consists of “Nod,” a dream-vision narrative set mostly in the darkness of a shopping mall parking lot in Atlanta. Standing there, a man, who refers to himself as Fulton, though “of course there was no Fulton,” finds himself in an age so mired in…
Some years ago, while visiting T. S. Eliot’s native St. Louis, I took in a lecture on Eliot’s poem “Marina,” delivered by the Scottish poet and critic Robert Crawford. Most people will grant that T. S. Eliot (1888-1965) is a difficult poet, but after 20 years of reading him, I find that “Marina” is…
Every time I return to the poetry of Wallace Stevens, I am struck by how the world of his work appears bleak, emptied, almost entirely unpopulated. Even the perceiver who voices his philosophical lyrics is concealed for the sake of foregrounding perception itself, that the intermingling play of…
Although 1 percent, perhaps, of Americans read poetry outside the schoolhouse, and the vast majority would tell you that they do not understand it, we all know more about it than we let on. We know that love poems talk in rhyme about roses; we know that short, spare poems that sound faintly…
When Paul Lake published his controversial novel Cry Wolf: A Political Fable (2008), critics immediately recognized it as an adaptation of Animal Farm for the post-9/11 world. In Animal Farm (1945), George Orwell allegorically dissected the mendacity of Stalinism, which had hijacked a genuinely…