Anecdotal Evidence

One of my annual jobs as a boy, self-assigned, was tending the portulaca that grew along both sides of the driveway -- hundreds of plants in...

In the epilogue to the third volume of The Civil War: A Narrative (1958-74), Shelby Foote describes the origins of Memorial Day and recounts...

“The whole insincere suggestion of most churchyards now is that life has been spent in a vale of tears: a long tribulation, merely a prepara...

In junior high school, in a closet-like room just off the cafeteria, was a bookstore displaying several dozen paperbacks arranged on wire ra...

Let’s start with the title of Jonathan Swift’s 1723 poem “Pethox the Great.” A Greek general? A biomed startup? This being Swift, it’s an a...

Last week I wrote about a new book by Nicholas Tate, Seven Books That Everyone Once Read and No One Now Does (Ludovika University Press, B...

“It is the province of poems to make some order in the world, but poets can’t afford to forget that there is a reality of things which survi...