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: 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 […]

By: David Smay

I know it’s a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might be the greatest poet ever to be rejected by the Soviet School for Submariners. (Tragically, there were no survivors of the School for […]

By: James Parker

Absurdity’s great-uncle; Freudian punchline, with all those noses of yours (a procession of disappointed phalli); exploder-in-chief of the grand Victorian beard (you filled it with birds)… we salute you, EDWARD LEAR (1812-1888). You did to […]