Anecdotal Evidence

Sometimes a sliver of poetry or prose, a single line or phrase, attracts our attention by glowing, as though surrounded by darkness. Take th...

Most of the books I read today I have read before, whether last year or half a century ago. So too, many of the books I purchase are old acq...

For many years the theme of our Thanksgiving Day has been Ben Jonson’s “Inviting a Friend to Supper,” which begins:   “Tonight, grave sir,...

“People who get their wisdom out of books are like those who have got their knowledge of a country from the descriptions of travellers. Trut...

Nominally a translation from the Latin of Juvenal’s Tenth Satire, “The Vanity of Human Wishes” is an autonomous poem in English, endlessly r...

My sons are living in Westchester County, Maryland and Peru. All are employed and self-reliant and have successfully enacted a young man’s t...

Edwin Arlington Robinson was nineteen in 1890 when he met Emma Shepherd, who was four years his senior. Like a million other men, he was smi...