Whenever I see sheets drying on the line or smell gumbo simmering on the stove, a flood of memories comes to me. In 1953 when I traveled in the rural South with a group of students, we received the generosity of strangers—African Americans...
In 1967, Viking Press published The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. Moore’s only explanation for the dozens of published poems eliminated from her “complete” work consisted of the brief epigraph: “Omissions are not accidents.”
The vacant lot where we North Third Street kids played softball on those sunny Connecticut summer days was full of trees, and it was small. When we wanted to play hardball, we went down the street, to West Main, crossed, walked a hundred...
There were six of them, the best and bravest of the hero’s companions. Turning back from his post in the bows, Odysseus was in time to see them lifted, struggling, into the air, to hear their screams, the desperate repetition of his own...
“Mediaeval liberty,” said Lord Acton, “differs from modern in this, that it depended on property.” But the difference is surely a difference oniy in degree, not in kind. Money may have less influence in a modern than in a mediaeval court of...
