Essays

By Joseph Charles MacKenzie, for the Society of Classical Poets Born in 1939 Samuel Gilliland attended the ancient Dreghorn School in an old mining village on the right bank of the river Irvine, said village having passed from the De Morville’s, Lord High Constables of Scotland, to Roland, Lord of...

By James Sale Donald Mace Williams Wolfe and Other Poems is an extraordinarily good collection of poems, clearly written by a veteran writer. The underlying credo of the collection is very aptly summed up in the opening poem called, appropriately, 'Credo': Step out under the stars on a dark night Or...

Poetry, as we have discussed in earlier parts of this article series, depends upon the Muses and accessing the deeper self or soul within each person; this is not an easy thing to do. In the 18th century Lord Chesterfield commented on how an individual could be anything they chose...

By Joshua Philipp Abbie Farwell Brown described the far north in his 1902 book, "In The Days of Giants," as "the land of the midnight sun, where summer is green and pleasant, but winter is a terrible time of cold and gloom; where rocky mountains tower like huge giants, over...

This essay was written in 2007 and has remained unpublished until now. by Ludiew E. Sarceb Few of the contemporary poets with whom I am familiar have any profound sense of history (and, therefore, of our present moment), nor do they strive after exacting literary standards. I live in a...

It has long been observed that whilst the ego is useful in making daily and ordinary decisions in our life, it is less effective when it comes to more important issues; it is by nature competitive, and it tends to subordinate the greater good for more immediate gains and self-gratification....

By Joshua Philipp The poetry of John Keats is known for its light and dreamy nature. Even in his time, in the early 1800s, he was considered old-fashioned, both in his topics and in his style of writing. He was set in sharp contrast to one of his contemporaries, Lord...

The Muses we understand from Part 1 of this article are the daughters of the future and the past, and more specifically of memory, light, truth and beauty; they are essential for the ‘good life’, and we understand as well that because they are goddesses, they cannot be summoned by...

By Joshua Philipp The Italian poet Dante Alighieri is best known for his journey into hell, purgatory, and heaven which he told of in his "Divine Comedy." But before he took that journey, he took a very different, although in some ways very similar, journey into the world of longing,...

By Sandeep Kumar Mishra There are two things that came to my mind when I read the book Hare Krishna by Mahathi: First, in this modern era in which every person thinks himself a poet, the shape, size and sweetness of the traditional poetry has been lost. Now, it is an...

By Joseph Charles MacKenzie James Sale, whom I happen to consider England’s best on the subject, states: “To write poetry with any degree of power, and to create true beauty without which the effort is vain, requires form and discipline.” Of form and discipline our poet is never in want....

We live in a post-modernist world and its values are everywhere around us; and everywhere these values are almost largely unexamined, and because we have little to contrast our present state with we fail to see how lamentable and poor we are. There is a deep materialism running through society...

By Joshua Philipp The Japanese creation story begins in a time of primordial chaos, and from this the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami emerge to create the Japanese islands. This is the first tale in The Kojiki, the oldest surviving Japanese book. It tells of the ancient legends of...

By Evan Mantyk A veritable Renaissance woman, Sally Cook is both an accomplished poet who's regularly published in National Review and an accomplished artist whose paintings are on display at the Burchfield Penney Art Center, of the State University of New York. Her recent poem on the demerits of Walt Whitman caused quite...

By Alex Phuong The night sky has served as the inspiration for many poets and writers, from Longfellow’s “The Light of Stars” to “Stars” by Robert Frost, and still does. Profoundly and mysteriously beautiful, Carol Smallwood’s In Hubble’s Shadow is an artistic exploration of mankind’s place in the universe that...

By Sandeep Kumar Mishra and Evan Mantyk English poetry has a rich history dating back at least 1,400 years. Looking at poetry today, it is easy to get trapped into thinking that the flurry of poetic movements of the last one hundred years or so are incredibly important and represent...

By Evan Mantyk In the sea of free verse, drifting downward into the bottomless whirlpool of aesthetic relativism, it is hard to not get lost; but poet, editor, and professor Joseph S. Salemi seems to have found the other shore. He has stood firm on the bedrock of rhyme and meter...

By James Sale There are nine Muses of poetry, daughters of Zeus or some say Apollo, and the Titaness, Mnenosyne, goddess of memory, past and future. And of these nine the most important is Kalliope, she of the Lovely Voice, and the muse of epic poetry; and she is considered...

By Evan Mantyk Last year, the College Board released a significantly redesigned Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The SAT is used by millions of student applicants each year to gain admission to U.S. colleges and universities. The redesign brought the SAT closer to its counterpart, the other major U.S. college-admissions test, the...

By Wilbur Dee Case One of the most unlikely poems of the Modernist period is that by Robert Frost: "The Pasture." It is unlikely for many reasons. First, it seems more like a Romantic lyric, i.e., one hundred years too late, because of its rural depiction and its simple, formal...

By Evan Mantyk One week in mid-January this year, in the relatively obscure world of poetry, Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s “Pibroch for the Domnhall” exploded like an atomic bomb, shattering perceptions that rhyming and rhythmic poetry—poetry that common people appreciate or at least understand for a change—was dead upon the stage of...

by Evan Mantyk WHAT DOES THE classic Chinese story Journey to the West have to do with William Shakespeare’s classic play Hamlet? A lot it turns out. Both Hamlet and Journey to the West were written in the late 16th century, one in China and the other in England. Both rely heavily on poetry. Both also are...

By Evan Mantyk From The Iliad, Beowulf, and Shakespearean literature in the West to the Chinese Classic of Poetry, the Indian Ramayana, and the Middle Eastern Epic of Gilgamesh, classical poetry is the foundation of literature in almost every culture historically. Today, if you can understand, appreciate, and write a...

By Jane Blanchard On December 5, 1830, Christina Rossetti was born in London to an Italian-English mother married to an Italian poet in exile.  The youngest of four children, all of whom grew up to be published authors, Rossetti became so well regarded for her work that she was mentioned...

A Quick Haiku Guide  A traditional haiku should... 1. Be three lines. The first line should have five syllables, the second seven syllables, the third five syllables. Seventeen syllables total. 2. Contain a nature or seasonal reference: the crumbling leaves, the cold air, the smell of manure, the taste of...

by Conrad Geller People are always asking "What are the best love poems?" or "Where can I find something beautiful to say to the woman I love?" or "...to the man I love?" If you are looking for love poems in more modern language, you will probably find the 10...

By Evan Mantyk Michael Curtis A classical architect, sculptor, painter, and poet, Michael Curtis is, in no uncertain terms, a Renaissance man. He has taught and lectured at universities, colleges, and museums, including the Institute of Classical Architecture and the National Gallery of Art. His pictures and statues are housed...

By Conrad Geller Poets demonstrably know nothing about death since it is, in Hamlet’s phrase, “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” Yet from the Egyptian Book of the Dead some 4,500 years ago to the latest agony in the current issue of your favorite literary journal, bards...

By James Sale This is a curious collection from Douglas Thornton: ambitious, epic in its style, containing many great lines and ideas, but also strangely baffling, quirky, and—I have to say—awkward.  The title, for starters, Woodland Poems, certainly led me to expect a kind of poetry that would be immediately...

By Sharon Kilarski | Originally Published in The Epoch Times A sonnet by Betsy Hughes offers unmistakable relief; you can actually understand what you are reading. Words in glistening, clear images form ideas, which gather together unostentatiously to draw you toward satisfaction. For this poet, who champions accessible language and...

By Douglas Thornton "And lo I lie between the sun and thee" (Venus and Adonis; line 194) To see the poet in the act of composition, to hear his words tell not only the story, but with imaginative zeal, recount the inner movements of his life, makes prejudice relax, and...

By James Sale In our egalitarian and democratic societies we very much hope and want all good things to be available to all people if they have a mind to have them. Indeed, in the world of personal development you can achieve whatever you believe (paraphrasing one of its leading...

By James Sale Poetry is a delicate balance of language that is prone to either too much yin or too much yang; or put another way, as the poet steers his or her course like Odysseus towards his true soul, Penelope, waiting at home, he must venture through the double...

By Wilbur Dee Case | Edited by Kent Van May Now I can see why T.S. Eliot disliked Edgar Allan Poe's verse; Eliot was trying to write a different kind of poetry; and it is no surprise that, for Eliot, Poe was no kindred spirit. Yet it was unwise for Eliot...

See full Epoch Times article on Robert Florczak.

By Damian Robin Quick, pick a good book of poems and let your soul soar. Or clip in your ear buds and listen to words by the score. Or rack up some speakers and loudly let rhetoric roar — it’s April, it’s Poetry Month, let poems take the floor. The...

By Dusty Grein and Evan Mantyk “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the English language’s most popular and influential poems since it was written in 1845. Much of this was Poe’s own doing, as he performed it quite frequently, and wrote many essays and commentaries on it...

By Kristina Pentchoukova Right from the first email from William Ruleman, I knew that I was interacting with a classicist who upheld traditional English in all manner of communication and behavior. Every email read like a letter. Later, I was honestly surprised by his Southern accent—for some reason, I expected...

By James Sale There are two things I don’t like about “When We Were Slugs”, the new poetry collection from James Manlow, the erstwhile Poet Laureate for Bournemouth, England (pictured above). The first dislike is the cover, which to me seems a mess, a splodge. My second objection is the...

by Reid McGrath I forewarn you that these are the 10 greatest English Sonnets addressed to or concerning other poets and are not even the 10 greatest short poems concerning other poets. There are innumerable other short poems addressed to other poets which are wonderful and remarkable, from Ezra Pound’s...