“But what is this poem about?” This dread question stalks almost every poetry classroom, and it’s vanquished only to return with a tenacity that would intimidate Michael Myers. Most recently, Ernie Lepore, a professor at Rutgers, took a swing at it in The New York Times’s … [Read more...]

Copyright law is so often a matter of guesswork and loopholes, small print and obscure provisions. One such provision, dating from the ’70s, has recently come to the music industry’s attention. “Termination rights” allow musicians to reclaim the copyrights on their songs after 35 … [Read more...]

The achievement of a style is like the achievement of an individual poem writ large: it’s a delicate balance of confidence and guesswork, as the writer simultaneously relies on what’s worked in the past, bets on what might work right now and tries to leave a little room for … [Read more...]

The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive … [Read more...]

Why would anyone want to be a poet? If that question seems too broad (or too harsh), let’s try a more modest one: Why would someone who’s already mastered an art form that is vastly more influential and lucrative than poetry — fiction or songwriting, for example — want to be a … [Read more...]

Richard Wilbur (born in 1921) has been for decades a Grand Old Man of American poetry, and he’s spent most of his career being alternately praised and condemned for the same three things. First, he’s widely agreed to be a formal virtuoso. One might think this would be an … [Read more...]

Imagine that this essay began not with the sentence you’re reading, but with the following observation, attributed to Wittgenstein: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” A little … [Read more...]

The publication of a volume of selected ­poems is an appropriate occasion to appraise a poet’s career, and an equally appropriate occasion to wonder why we use the word “career” in connection with poetry at all. Many readers would agree with Randall Jarrell’s definition of a poet … [Read more...]

When Ruth Padel resigned last week as Oxford’s professor of poetry after only nine days on the job, it put an end — for now, at least — to a tale that began with past charges of sexual harassment against Ms. Padel’s primary competition for the position, the Nobel laureate Derek … [Read more...]

Many poets have been acquainted with the night; some have been intimate with it; and a handful have been so haunted and intoxicated by the darker side of existence that it can be hard to pick them out from the murk that surrounds them. As Poems 1959-2009 (Farrar, Straus & … [Read more...]

The poet Craig Arnold, who has been missing since May 2, is presumed dead. His family and friends have been attempting to reclaim his body from a ravine on the volcanic island he’d been exploring; if you’re interested in assisting with this effort, please visit the Facebook group … [Read more...]

In October, John Ashbery became the first poet to be honored with a volume of his works in the Library of America series during his own lifetime. That honor says a number of things about the state of contemporary poetry — some good, some not so good — but perhaps the most … [Read more...]

There are two ways to talk about the new Letters of Ted Hughes (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $45), edited by Christopher Reid. The first is to approach Hughes’s correspondence as an illuminating aesthetic record, the clearest insight we’re likely to get into the mind of a poet … [Read more...]

Last Thursday, the Swedish Academy announced that the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature was the Frenchman Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio, immediately disappointing every writer not named Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clézio and prompting the standard complaints from fans of authors … [Read more...]

Over the past 50 years, Clive James has worked as a British television personality; a radio broadcaster; a travel writer; a trainee bus conductor; a book reviewer for major publications in the United States, Britain and his native Australia; a flunky in a machine shop; a … [Read more...]

In a half-filled auditorium, a poet was reading a poem about the death of a child. Autumn leaves fell, night descended, the hours became slow and cold and endless; it was pretty sad stuff. Afterward, an audience member came up to say how much he’d enjoyed the reading and how … [Read more...]

The critic is the only artist who depends entirely upon another art form, which means that part of his job is to determine the nature of that relationship. Should he be an advocate? A policeman? A curator? A hanging judge? A mostly loyal but occasionally snippy personal … [Read more...]

“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop tells us — and yet artistry can often seem the least appropriate response to the misery of loss. When pain is primitive and specific, as it is after the death of a loved one, then we don’t want an exquisite performance … [Read more...]

“We poets in our youth begin in gladness,” wrote Wordsworth, who might have felt otherwise had he spent his own youth as an adjunct assistant professor of creative writing. If he’d done so, as many younger writers do nowadays, he’d probably have thought twice about pairing … [Read more...]

No contemporary poet is famous, but some are less unfamous than others. That’s because the poetry world, like most areas of American life, has its own peculiar celebrity system — and if the rewards of that system rarely involve gift suites filled with swag from Jean Patou, they … [Read more...]

It’s easy to say which nation has the fastest trains (France) or the largest number of prime ministers who’ve probably been eaten by sharks (Australia), but it’s impossible to know which country has the best writers, let alone the best poets. Even so, if cash money were on the … [Read more...]

The history of American poetry, like the history of America itself, is a story of ingenuity, sacrifice, hard work and sticking it to people when they least expect it. Whether it’s Ezra Pound dismissing his benefactor Amy Lowell as a “hippopoetess” or Yvor Winters accusing his … [Read more...]