For serious readers of poetry, this author is its epicenter of literary criticism. Throughout her tenure at Harvard University as Professor of English, from thoughtful reviews to her several studies on Yeats, Stevens, Seamus Heaney, to... Read More

This is an appropriate poet to carry on the tradition of Walt Whitman. The poems in this first collection may not contain “barbaric yawps,” but they certainly speak authoritatively. In “Self-Portrait as Miranda,” the speaker... Read More

In England (where the author enjoys higher name recognition as Oxford University’s Goldsmiths Professor of English Literature, author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather among others, and a Commander of the British Empire... Read More

This book takes its title from a song in the 1936 film musical, Swing Time, which starred Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. The lyric recalls a sophisticated tension that strikes the perfect mood and sets the tempo for this all-out... Read More

Childhood carries with it plenty of feelings of being different. When another reason comes along for peers to make fun of each other or try to find fault, it takes sensitive parents to help overcome the sadness of being singled out. In... Read More

Reconciling science with religion is a longstanding, ongoing project in America. For most people today, electricity is still somewhat magical: they can neither produce it nor explain it. Two centuries ago, it was an awesome new discovery... Read More

If a person has been wronged by another, shouldn’t the common course of action for making things right be to forgive and forget? That’s a popular distortion, according to the author. The real process is this: to remember fully and... Read More

The American public knew more about Wynona Ryder’s shoplifting trial than it did about the history of U.S. involvement in Iraq. Peter Phillips, director of Project Censored, faults corporate media. He observes that with only a handful... Read More