Anecdotal Evidence

L ike Edward Gibbon, Yvor Winters tucks some of his best stuff into footnotes. Take this provocation from “English Literature in the Sixteen...

“I know, for both of us, the dead world’s much too crowded.”   Live long enough and all, reluctantly, must agree. Most of our relatives an...

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem ...

I’ll spare you the joke the phlebotomist told me while drawing blood from my arm. Given the circumstance I mustered a polite titter in respo...

This is the time of year I feel a pang for the Northern autumn. The temperature in Houston, as I write on Monday, is eighty-six degrees. The...

As an obstinately monolingual American, I rely on the precious work of translators. The three poets I read most often in translation, in ord...

Among Clive James’ books, perhaps the least read is Gate of Lilacs (Picador, 2016), a book of poems mostly about Marcel Proust and James’ i...