Essays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (born February 27, 1807 - died March 24, 1882) was an American poet of the Romantic period. He served as a professor at Harvard University and was an adept linguist, traveling throughout Europe and immersing himself in European culture and poetry, which he emulated in his poetry. Before...

by Annabelle Fuller John Keats (born October 31, 1795 - died February 23, 1821) began life as the son of a stable-owner, and ended it as an unmarried, poor and tuberculosis-ridden young man. Somewhere along the way, he managed to become one of the most beloved poets of the English...

By Sam Gilliland The Poisoned Chalice Let he who lips me then beware, My potion’s more than honeyed mead, One sip, I shall your soul ensnare, Death conquers all, so take you heed! It is a foolhardy enterprise to embark upon a venture so obviously doomed to failure that the...

By Con Chapman Boston may no longer be the Hub of the Universe, but its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area remains the undisputed capital of America in at least one respect—home of suicidal poetesses. The western suburbs, where I live, form American poetry’s Bermuda Triangle. Sylvia Plath, raised in Wellesley, took...

Any treatise claiming critical review of verse, whether in the widest sense, or, as in this case, the result of compressed choice, purely down to the author’s own consideration, I hasten to add, is probably deigned to fail as an intelligent summation of poetry penned by John Keats. That said,...

The poetry of Fray Angelico Chavez can be read here. By Joseph Charles MacKenzie Fray Angélico Chávez, O.F.M. (1910-1996) remains the most important poet of New Mexico’s modern history. It is precisely by virtue of this gifted priest, polymath, historian, author, and painter, that we in New Mexico are able...

by Dusty Grein The Man The American poet Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, CA. He spent his first 40 years mostly unknown, and it wasn’t until after returning to the United States from England—where he had his first two books of poetry published—near the...

John Milton (Born December 9, 1608 – died November 8, 1674) was an English poet of the late Renaissance period. He is most noted for his epic poem on the fall of Satan and Adam and Eve’s ejection from the Garden of Eden, Paradise Lost, which he composed after having gone...

By David Gosselin The answer to the above question is of course no. Shakespeare and Dante are not dead because every true poet is immortal. However, much of our contemporary thinkers seem to be under the impression that they are dead, and that they are not as relevant and talented...

An Introduction to Poetry and Its Place in an Integral Human Formation Introduction  It is well known to most sensible educators that one of the fundamental goals of their profession is the so-called “integral formation” of their students.  The enthusiastic educator strives to propose this formation, for he knows that to...

by Jane Blanchard Beatrice, Dante Alighieri’s second guide in La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), makes her literary debut in an earlier work, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a combination of prose and poetry that details his encounters with the girl, and then the woman, who became his muse....

Click here to download the entire book as a pdf file. By Leonard Dabydeen In the fraternity of poetic minds we can luxuriate joyously on the richness of old age, or on becoming old but fresh as sunshine in its glory across expansive horizons. Polish poet Stanislaw Jerzy Lec said, “Youth...

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...