In Oxford, Mississippi, having cruised Main Street, going (as Benjy did not) the correct legal way around the square and its Confederate soldier, you make your way to William Faulkner’s house, “Rowanoak,” set back from the street imposingly in a grove of large old trees. Don’t ask which tree is a “rowan oak”: a rowan is an ash, “rowan oak” not a species like “live oak” or “white oak” or “pinoak” but more like the “u” he inserted in his name; more like his portrait, in oils, in full riding habit, as if riding to the hounds were his habit;...

Although few poets may be left who fully endorse Keats’s definition of “poetical character,” surprisingly many, some of them women, do believe still that the individual self of the artist—sexual, ethnic, historical, political, and geographical—is subverted to the uses and priorities of his or her art. Few of those, however, will say so as bluntly as Elizabeth Bishop did: “Undoubtedly gender does play an important part in the making of any art, but art is art and to separate writings, paintings, musical compositions, etc., into two sexes is to emphasize values in them that are not art” (letter...

In comparisons to John Donne in his 1921 essay on the Metaphysical poets, T. S. Eliot said, “Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.” Set beside the sample he ferrets out of Tennyson, the assessment seems generous:

One walked between his wife and child,

With measured footfall firm and mild,

And now and then he gravely smiled.

The prudent partner of his blood

Leaned on him, faithful, gentle, good,

Wearing the rose of womanhood.

And in their double love secure,

The little maiden walked...

There are two usual ways to praise the image. The first assumes that art is representational or “imitative,” recording and embodying the shared reality we think of as the world. From this largely classical aesthetic position the image is valued as “a picture made out of words,” “the sensuous element in poetry,” and

the reproduction in the mind of a sensation produced by a physical perception. . . . When Archibald Macleish says, in “Ars Poetica,” that a poem should be “Dumb / As old medallions to the thumb,” he not only means that the language of poetry should make...

I had intended, for months, to write about clarity—as a first principle, as a life’s goal. I had even set aside a clutch of my favorite poems as illustration and working text, poems that were resonant, complex, and yet clear. Then the mail brought in a bulletin, a newsletter, some of whose news was a symposium on Emily Dickinson, one of the poets in my clarity file. With more than a mild interest I turned to the appropriate pages and fixed especially on the responses to “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun.”

My Life had stood—a Loaded...

Poet and novelist Stephen Dobyns has said that every lyric poem implies a narrative. What he means is a sequence of past events, left out of the poem, that brought the speaker to the present, intensified moment in the poem. Assuming the speaker is the poet, Dobyns also means autobiography—if not an actual experience, then the life story informing the utterance, bleeding through in tone or quirky detail. Implicit in his observation is a wish for more information, more context than a densely musical text can accommodate. It’s a preference that speculates over dinner about the couple at the...

These days, when genre seems a relic of simpler times, one would hardly blink at Polonius’s oxymoronic blurb—“pastoral–comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral.” For instance, a recent journal article concludes with this flurry of terms: “His short narrative [s], . . . with their sympathetic focus on human behavior, especially in dramatic situations, combine the power of the story and the emotion of the lyric in a way that is highly compressed and formally beautiful” (Mark Jarman, “Aspects of Robinson”).

The work thus praised is the rhymed poetry of E. A. Robinson, proposed in the article as precursor to a...

In the August 15, 1991, issue of the New York Review of Books, building toward the term “romantic alchemy” with which to celebrate a particular American poet as the “voice of our times,” John Bayley cites five specific achievements: use of the banal, disregard for meaning, annoyance with readers who search for a subject matter, rejection of “memorable speech,” and swift casualness of composition. Poems are to be praised, in short, as “talk”—the “proper noise that a poet should make,” “the natural noise of a contingent present.” Thus are one poet’s idiosyncrasies extracted and enlarged; thus the invitation to...

In Dr. Zhivago (the movie) there is a scene in which handsome, mustached Omar Sharif, surrogate for Boris Pasternak, bundled up against the dangerous cold in his empty dacha with Julie Christie and Geraldine Chaplin relegated off-screen, is composing a love poem. While the theme song strums softly in the background, the camera pans the vast snow-blown, wolf-haunted steppes, moving in slowly to show the poet sitting alone in a large room at a low table, alternately staring out the window and bending down to his heavy-weight bond paper. He pauses, chews his pen, adjusts his ragged gloves and long...