Politics Literature Arts Ideas

Poetry

Clair Wills

Learning to Grieve

A poet and a psychologist consider the necessity of mourning our dead.

November 19, 2020 issue

Landscape painting, Tang dynasty era (618–907)

Madeleine Thien

Poems Without an ‘I’

In Chinese poetry, fiction, and philosophy, the “I” is not the nerve center from which thought and knowledge begin.

October 8, 2020 issue

Langdon Hammer

The Art of Losing

‘The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle’

December 19, 2019 issue

Louise Glück

Afternoons and Early Evenings

a poem

November 7, 2019 issue

David Shulman

Waiting for the Perfect Word

September 26, 2019 issue

Mark Ford

‘Inventing New Ways to Be’

Adrienne Rich’s books reveal an astonishing power not only to capture the shifting spirit of the times but to anticipate the dilemmas of the future

November 8, 2018 issue

Horace; detail from Luca Signorelli’s fresco of the Last Judgment in the Cathedral of Orvieto, Italy, 1500–1503

Gregory Hays

Horace’s How-To

“Human” is the opening word of the ‘Ars Poetica.’ This is unlikely to be an accident.

June 11, 2020 issue

Christopher Benfey

The Haiku of Confinement

Bedridden in his Odéon apartment, Richard Wright spent the last year and a half of his life writing haiku.

June 25, 2020

The Latest

Claire Messud

The Dream of Pure Expression

A new translation of Paul Valéry’s poems also includes rousing extracts from his extraordinary notebooks.

December 3, 2020 issue

Marianne Boruch

The Sirens

a poem

December 3, 2020 issue

Irina Dumitrescu

Dudes Without Heirs

Maria Headley translates ‘Beowulf,’ a story in which women make the world, and men make their legends by destroying it.

December 3, 2020 issue

Sandra Lim

Boston

a poem

November 19, 2020 issue

Ben Lerner

The Son

a poem

November 19, 2020 issue

Maureen N. McLane

Power

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Ange Mlinko

Naples, Florida

a poem

November 5, 2020 issue

Louise Glück

A Children’s Story

a poem

October 22, 2020 issue

Brenda Wineapple

Longfellow’s Gentle Phantoms

October 22, 2020 issue

Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Apples and a Pot of Primroses, circa 1890

Matthew Bevis

Kay Ryan, ‘Giddy with Thinking’

The poet Kay Ryan’s essays on literature are so deliriously good, so in excess of usefulness, that they’re often on their way to poetry.

September 26, 2020

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edited by David Bromwich

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The Last Libertines

Benedetta Craveri

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