By bringing together some seventy of his recent poems, Mark Van Doren, while continuing old themes, makes it clear that he has interested himself in a new theme for poetry. Psychologists might call this new preoccupation empathy, an intense...
With Elinor Wylie the poet—I mean, with the poet who wrote in verse—I plan no traffic. I can find in her verses nothing very remarkable, but then that has for many years been my attitude toward everyone’s verses, all the long way from...
Tadeusz Różewicz is a poet of dark refusals, hard negations. He is a naked or impure poet (“I crystallize impure poetry,” he writes), an anti-poet relentlessly, even ruthlessly determined to tell the truth, however painful it may be. He...
The fundamental problem of the nature of history could hardly be more clearly illustrated than by three recent biographies of Marc Antony, Cleopatra, and Augustus.
In the year 1834, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord, ci-devant Abbe de Perigord and Eveque d’Autun, later Prince de Benevent, now only Prince de Talleyrand, eighty years old but of sound and disposing mind, long since divested of every...