Anecdotal Evidence

I don’t remember old people complaining about being old when I was a kid. It might have been joked about in passing but I recall little indu...

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...

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...