Anecdotal Evidence

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...

C an a congenital pessimist reject the notion of an imminent apocalypse, a collapse of all that Western Civilization has accomplished? Sure,...

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...

“If you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do.” The most ebullient and unpretentio...

Two poets seldom linked came together in the New York Times on September 8, 1912. The writer was Joyce Kilmer, known forever as the author ...

Over the weekend I read a book review full of enthusiastic approval that was so poorly written, anything the critic had to say was immediate...

It’s a commonplace to say you can read a serious reader’s autobiography on his bookshelves. For some of us you can say the same of the libra...

The most casually intelligent person I have ever known was D.G. Myers , who died on this date, September 26, in 2014. I prize intelligence b...

“My first novel, Bright Center of Heaven , is a compendium of all the writers I loved and admired. In a symposium at Smith College, Saul Bel...

The first stanza of C.H. Sisson’s “The Red Admiral” ( Exactions , 1980):   “The wings tremble, it is the red admiral Ecstatically agains...

Clive James in his essay on Louis Armstrong in Cultural Amnesia (2007):   “[F]or the way I thought prose should move I learned a lot fro...

The late Victor Brombert writes in The Pensive Citadel (University of Chicago Press, 2023):   “[T]here is a rarer, quite precious experie...

Kafka somewhere says that impatience is a form of laziness. I would add that it’s also a form of egotism, a presumption that our clocks ough...