T.S. Eliot famously observed in his great poem, “The Four Quartets,” that April is the cruelest month. Economists quote this line every year during the first two weeks of that month when referencing ...

“Poetry leaves something out,” our columnist Elisa Gabbert says. But that’s hardly the extent of it. By Elisa Gabbert I once heard a student say poetry is language that’s “coherent enough.” I love a ...

in Poe’s “system” of Tarr and Fethering (fathering). The kind of poetry I want gums up the works. A tangle of truths. From the outset of his career Bernstein has fought for a poetry of leaps and ...

AMERICAN POETRY now belongs to a subculture. No longer part of the mainstream of artistic and intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group.

Helen Vendler is one of the most respected commentators on English-language poetry in our time. Readers coming to this book hoping for wise, well-found instruction will not be disappointed; they will ...

The essays in “Watch Your Language” are in close conversation with the poems in “So to Speak,” letting Hayes play with form and ideas. By Elisa Gabbert “Do questions or answers create history?” ...

“Will the near future necessitate warning labels in front of all published material?” asks Robert Atwan, in the foreword to The Best American Essays 2014. Atwan is worried about trigger warnings, ...