Today, when literary criticism—especially the close reading of lyric poetry—has become a suspect discipline, largely dismissed for its elitism and irrelevance to the political order, Michael Wood's elegant and concise study of the great British literary critic William Empson (1906-1984) is…

This long-awaited critical edition of T. S. Eliot's poems is a scholarly milestone, a watershed in publishing history. The elaborate notes Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue have provided for each line—indeed, each word—of each and every Eliot poem are so informative and the overviews for each stage…

Many of our finest poets—think of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound—are also known as major critics, but in Susan Howe's case, it has always been difficult to separate the two practices. My Emily Dickinson (1985), the book that first brought Howe wide attention, is at once revisionary scholarship, careful…

When I first met James Laughlin (1914-1997) in 1974, he was 60: tall, handsome, elegant, witty, and highly regarded as the founder and publisher of what was, to many of us, the great poetry press in the United States—New Directions. From the 1930s on, he had published all the key volumes of Ezra…