Anecdotal Evidence

I recently learned that an acquaintance had lost his job and my reflexive reaction was to laugh. The people I was with were offended. How co...

Irresistible title: “Books That Have Hindered Me.” The opening of Agnes Repplier’s essay is a fair sample of her prose and her genteelly cau...

I think of Edwin Arlington Robinson as an autumnal poet, just as certain others are vernal. Even when the ostensible subject is elsewhere, t...

The finest tribute to one writer by another I’ve read of late is John Lukacs’ “Agnes Repplier, Writer and Essayist.” Repplier (1855-1950) pu...

A reader asks why I so often write about poetry but am not a poet myself. “Have you ever written poems?” he asks. “Do you write them secretl...

I knew a computer science professor who now works, I think, for Google. He was an interesting fellow who defied many CS stereotypes. He read...

The title poem in Anthony Hecht’s 1979 collection The Venetian Vespers is a dramatic monologue spoken by an aging American expatriate livin...