By: Tim Carmody

“It is not at all with ideas that one makes poetry. It is with words.”

By: Joshua Glenn

Celebrating thirteen HiLo Heroes about whom we wrote in 2010.

By: David Smay

He wrote poetry of love glimpsed as a mystery from within the teeth of sex.

By: Brian Berger

“Master of the whimsical tone, the unexpected insight, the hidden bite.”

By: Matthew Battles

The life of ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985) is as an impenetrable forest, tree ravaging tree in a primordial war of the word. Himself the subject of more books than most authors can reasonably hope to write, […]

By: Brian Berger

Out of Bedlamite shrieks, a Melvillean lucidity.

By: Amanda French

A wandering, committed poet of crepuscular love.

By: Amanda French

An analyst of excess as well as a practitioner.

By: Joshua Glenn

Celebrating thirteen HiLo Heroes about whom we wrote in 2009.

By: Sarah Weinman

One of my favorite children’s books, the madcap Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back (1963), by SHEL SILVERSTEIN (1930-99), is about loneliness, friendship, and the perils of too much success — all of which turn […]

By: Douglas Wolk

OGDEN NASH (1902-71) was the American master of light verse, an art that has fallen on hard times, since it requires both gentle jokes that everyone can find amusing and barnstorming verbal agility of the […]

By: David Smay

The very public tragedies in the life of TED HUGHES (1930-98) sometimes overshadow his work. He’s been blamed him for the murder/suicide of his second wife and daughter, and most famously for the suicide of […]

By: Patrick Cates

Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and writer, cranked out short stories and poetry only in his spare time. These garnered him a reputation for miniatures that accurately and painfully […]

By: David Smay

ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) was the Joni Mitchell of her day, strikingly angular and beautiful, wrapped in a Spanish shawl, tearing through love affairs with the celebrated poets and artists of her age. Her early work […]

By: Erik Davis

You can grok many modernists through the forms of tradition they undermine and idolize. While Irish lore loomed mighty for WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS (1865-1939), the more scandalous tradition which beguiled the poet was the practical […]