Laurance Wieder is a poet and writer who contributed cultural criticism and essays to The Weekly Standard between 1998 and 2016. His pieces for the magazine ranged across arts and culture, covering topics from museum exhibitions and opera to literary figures like Milton. He is the author of several collections of poetry and has written extensively on art, religion, and literature.
ON SEPTEMBER 10, the day before we were attacked, I attended a press preview for two small photography exhibitions devoted to Egypt at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Along the Nile, a show mounted by the photography department, features photographs of Egypt made in the 1850s and 1860s.…
I wouldn't recommend John Milton's sacred epics, or even his short poems, to a newcomer to the English language.
Triangle
The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu translated by Royall Tyler Viking, 1,174 pp., $60 LIKE HOMER and Shakespeare, Lady Murasaki occupies a place alone. Epic poetry begins with Homer. Shakespeare invented modern tragedy. Murasaki, a lady-in-waiting in the eleventh-century court of Imperial Japan,…
William Blake spent much of his time in Paradise. Or so, at least, his wife Catherine reported. His protean genius is on display in "William Blake," a major exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until June 24. The show (a scaled-back version of the Blake retrospective put…
American Poetry:
New versions of Richard Wagner's operas are always epochal, if only because of the effort it takes to mount them. Particularly rare are productions of the complete four-opera cycle of Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung. But this spring, the Metropolitan Opera in New York presents the entire Ring, and…
This summer, in three performances, Lincoln Center in New York presented something rarer than Halley's Comet: The Peony Pavilion, the classic Chinese opera written at the end of the sixteenth century by Tang Xianzu (who died in 1616, the same year as William Shakespeare). Part of the rarity of the…
Arnold Schoenberg had a superstitious horror of the number thirteen. He was born on September 13, 1874, the day after Rosh Hashanah. A Viennese Jew reared as a Catholic, he converted to Lutheranism in his twenties, before returning to Judaism in 1933.
A side from the stories of Noah and Jonah, two chapters of Ezekiel, and a handful of passages in the Psalms and Job, sailors receive very little notice in the Old Testament. But in The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times, Raphael Patai contends that sea travel was no rarity for the…