Podcast Listen in: Now Comes Good Sailing December 03, 2021 The world is never done catching up with Henry David Thoreau (1817鈥�1862), the author of聽Walden, 鈥淐ivil Disobedience,鈥� and other classics. A prophet of environmentalism and vegetarianism, an abolitionist, and a critic of materialism and technology, Thoreau even seems to have anticipated a world of social distancing in his famous experiment at Walden Pond. Read More
Essay Bob Dylan鈥檚 鈥淢urder Most Foul鈥� and National Memory November 22, 2021 This week marks the 58th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. Last year鈥檚 anniversary went nearly unnoticed in the press. Read More
Essay Roger Luckhurst on Gothic: An Illustrated History October 28, 2021 How can you hope to navigate a genre that starts with a bunch of gloomy British poets brooding in crepuscular graveyards in the 1740s and ended up recently delivering us the sixth film in the Sharknado franchise (where killer sharks get hurled around by tornados, obviously)? Read More
Essay Edgar Allan Poe鈥檚 suburban dream October 27, 2021 If there were ever an American writer you would not associate with the suburbs, it鈥檚 Edgar Allan Poe. His popular image tends to be that of an isolated figure, oblivious to his surroundings. Read More
Video Hosts and Guests: Readings by poet Nate Klug October 07, 2021 Nate Klug has been hailed by the聽Threepenny Review聽as a poet who is 鈥渁n original in Eliot鈥檚 sense of the word.鈥� In聽Hosts and Guests, his exciting second collection, Klug revels in slippery roles and shifting environments. Read More
Video Not Meant as Poems October 05, 2021 Rain in Plural聽is the much-anticipated fourth collection of poetry by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, who has been praised by聽The Rumpus聽as 鈥渁 master of musicality and enlightening allusions.鈥� Read More
Interview Shelley Frisch on the work (and play) of translation September 30, 2021 Award-winning translator Shelley Frisch shares her thoughts about the principles that guide her work, rituals that she turns to as she settles in with a work, and what she enjoys most about translating texts. Read More
Essay The soft pipes September 16, 2021 As a philosopher who writes about love, I am sometimes asked what I love. I could answer in particulars: specific people, places, and objects. Read More
Essay French flowers in an English garden July 23, 2021 A summer walk through the garden of the English language reveals it sporting many a foreign flower. English has borrowed more words from French, in particular, than from any other modern foreign language. Read More
Podcast 脡migr茅s: French Words That Turned English July 16, 2021 Richard Scholar examines the continuing history of untranslated French words in English and asks what these words reveal about the fertile but fraught relationship that England and France have long shared. Read More
Essay A look inside Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 15, 2021 I was myself introduced to Eva Palmer Sikelianos while leafing through books and magazines about Greece in my parents鈥� library in the 1960s and 1970s. Read More
Essay Ivor Gurney: Writing in lockdown for fifteen years June 11, 2021 Contrary, perhaps, to expectation, few of us have produced great volumes of work in lockdown. Whilst many academics might previously have craved a moment out of time, for the world to stop and for them to have time to think, it doesn鈥檛 seem to have prompted the hoped-for avalanche of creativity. Read More
Podcast Listen in: Eva Palmer Sikelianos June 08, 2021 Listen to an audio sample from Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins, a new book about the American actor, director, composer, and weaver best known for reviving the Delphic Festivals. Read More
Podcast After Callimachus: Poems May 19, 2021 Callimachus may be the best-kept secret in all of ancient poetry. Loved and admired by later Romans and Greeks, his funny, sexy, generous, thoughtful, learned, sometimes elaborate, and always articulate lyric poems, hymns, epigrams, and short stories in verse have gone without a contemporary poetic champion, until now. Read More
Podcast Poet of Revolution: The Making of John Milton April 27, 2021 John Milton (1608鈥�1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both聽Paradise Lost, the greatest narrative poem in English, and prose defences of the execution of Charles I that influenced the French and American revolutions. Read More
