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Essays

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Essays

Two More Poems with ‘Conceits’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
March 27, 2021
Beauty, Essays, Humor, Poetry, Poetry Forms
10 Comments
. The Bibliophile’s Birth Certificate Marius Michel (1846-1925) was one of the most prominent and gifted bookbinders in France. He produced work in strikingly beautiful and unique designs, and today his...

A Beacon in the Darkness: The Poetics and Poetry of Robert Frost

The Society
March 26, 2021
Essays, Poetry
8 Comments
. “A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom.” ---Robert Frost An Essay by Adam Sedia To many in America, Robert Frost is the grandfatherly originator of “The Road Not Taken,” and a few other...

‘Pain, Product, and Poetry’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
March 22, 2021
Essays, Poetry
24 Comments
I went to my first opera when I was six years old. My mother took me to the world premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Saint of Bleecker Street, on the condition that I be a good boy and behave. It was some...

An Essay on the Canceling of Dr. Seuss: ‘If I Ran the Circus’ by Michael Curtis

The Society
March 9, 2021
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
5 Comments
. Girolamo Savonarola Here we are at circus, you and me and all the others, facing each and every way in the Age of Absurdity. Rather alike some Swiftian satire, some Aesopian consequence, some Seussian...

‘The White Man’s Burden’ by Rudyard Kipling: Poem, Background, and Analysis

The Society
March 4, 2021
Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
51 Comments
. A Teaching Tool for High School English Language Arts or Global History Teachers by Evan Mantyk . Background of Kipling and British India Rudyard Kipling The poet, Rudyard Kipling, was born in British India...

A Review of James A. Tweedie’s Mostly Sonnets: Formal Poetry in an Informal World

The Society
March 3, 2021
Beauty, Essays, Poetry, Reviews
13 Comments
Mostly Sonnets: Formal Poetry in an Informal World by James A. Tweedie, Dunecrest Press, July 2019 by Theresa Rodriguez As a fellow sonneteer, I felt like I was reading the words of a kindred spirit when I...

The Power of One: Monosyllables in Classical Poetry

The Society
February 18, 2021
Essays, Poetry, Poetry Forms
16 Comments
by Adam Sedia The origin of poetry is inextricably tied to music. The earliest poems---the Homeric epics, the Chinese Book of Songs---were all lyrics to be sung. Because vowels allow the open voice to sing...

The Singing Lines of Theresa Rodriguez: A Review of Sonnets

The Society
January 12, 2021
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
13 Comments
by Andrew Benson Brown Theresa Rodriguez, Sonnets. 2nd edition. Shanti Arts, 193 Hillside Road, Brunswick, ME, 04011, 2020. 75 pp. $12.95. In his literary criticism, William Empson showed a subtle...

Two Poems Making Use of ‘Conceits,’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
January 9, 2021
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
26 Comments
. The Death of Today’s Sequoia Flecte ramos, arbor alta, tensa laxa viscera: Et rigor lentescat ille, quem dedit nativitas, Ut superni membra regis miti tendas stipite. —Venantius Fortunatus (c. 530-609...

The Struggle for the Formalist Tradition: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
December 13, 2020
Deconstructing Communism, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
58 Comments
  Why are many young persons so bad at writing formal poetry? Why do they struggle and labor and twist and turn when trying to compose formal verse? OK, I’ll grant you this: every beginning poet has...

Essay: ‘Portrait of a Millennial Art Student’ by Sally Cook

The Society
October 24, 2020
Art, Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
22 Comments
  You’ve grown up in the public school system, and it shows. You are sensitive to the world around you, and in touch with your “feelings”—a perfect little guilt-ridden example of a...

A Review of Juvenalia by Reid McGrath

The Society
October 12, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
12 Comments
Juvenalia by Reid McGrath, Kelsay Books, 2019 by James Sale Regular readers of The Society of Classical Poets’ pages will be familiar with the name of Reid McGrath; he has been extensively published...

On Troublemakers: Two Translations from Phaedrus, by Terry L. Norton

The Society
September 24, 2020
Children's, Culture, Essays, Poetry, Translation
9 Comments
On Troublemakers: Two Translations* from the Latin Poet Phaedrus, Freedman of Augustus (first century A.D.) Translator’s Prologue These little tales from ancient Rome Concern those who would foment...

Ekphrastic Economy: A Review of Memoirs of a Witness Tree, by Randal A. Burd, Jr.

The Society
September 20, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
6 Comments
Memoirs of a Witness Tree, by Randal A. Burd, Jr. Kelsay Books, 2020 by Andrew Benson Brown Reading Aristotle’s Poetics is in some ways a curious experience for the practitioner of poetry. In this...

The Rebirth of Epic: A Review of James Sale’s HellWard

The Society
August 22, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry, Reviews
31 Comments
by Andrew Benson Brown James Sale’s HellWard is the first volume of a planned trilogy entitled The English Cantos. If the quality of the current volume is any indication of the two forthcoming ones, then...

Understanding Bad Poetry: The Verse of William Topaz McGonagall

The Society
August 16, 2020
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
20 Comments
by Joseph S. Salemi The poetic effusions of some people are so incompetent that they cross the line into unexpected humor, and thereby become valuable. Such is the case with the work of William Topaz...

The Spice of Life: Metric Variation in Formal Verse (An Essay)

The Society
July 13, 2020
Culture, Essays, Poetry, Poetry Forms
15 Comments
by Adam Sedia John Dryden In 1688, John Dryden, England’s first official poet laureate, was deprived of that title for remaining Catholic and replaced with the laughably inferior Thomas Shadwell....

An Analysis of ‘The Gods of the Copybook Headings’ by Rudyard Kipling

The Society
June 9, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
9 Comments
  The Gods of the Copybook Headings by Rudyard Kipling AS I PASS through my incarnations in every age and race, I make my proper prostrations to the Gods of the Market Place. Peering through...

A Smorgasbord of Craziness: An Essay by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
June 8, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
15 Comments
I recently discarded some unnecessary texts, and among them were two past editions (the 17th and the 20th) of Len Fulton’s Directory of Poetry Publishers. This venerable publication, from Dustbooks in...

Philip Larkin: A Very English Bleakness (An Essay)

The Society
May 26, 2020
Essays, Poetry
20 Comments
by David Whippman In 1984, Philip Larkin was asked to become the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. This position is, in principle, the most prestigious that any British poet can attain: in effect, court...
John Keats

Keats in the Time of Coronavirus: An Essay

The Society
May 20, 2020
Beauty, Coronavirus, Culture, Essays, Poetry
34 Comments
by Sultana Raza In April 1820, Keats was already aware that he had tuberculosis, and in spring of that year, he was experiencing fever, a bad chest, and lots of anxiety, specially about not being able to...

William Butler Yeats and the Occult: An Essay by Adam Sedia

The Society
May 19, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Deconstructing Communism, Essays, Poetry
27 Comments
Clarity and Obscurity Part III Read Part I: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared Read Part II: "Concrete" Poetry and the Fall of Metaphor by Adam Sedia Modernism produces obscure poetry...

Ten Great Spenserian or Scottish Sonnets

The Society
May 15, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Love Poems, Poetry
19 Comments
Edmund Spenser by Margaret Coats Edmund Spenser (1552–1599) wrote 121 sonnets of rhyme scheme abab bcbc cdcd ee, including 87 in his love sequence Amoretti. The Spenserian sonnet differs from the...

Review: ‘The Stargazers,’ A First Book of Poems by James McKee

The Society
April 9, 2020
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
by T.M. Moore James McKee, The Stargazers (Atmosphere Press, 2020), $17.99 James McKee’s inaugural foray into verse publishing offers a panoply of poetic forms, themes, images, and delights. The Stargazers...

‘Briefs’: A New Poetry Form

The Society
March 23, 2020
Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry, Poetry Contests, Poetry Forms
21 Comments
by James A. Tweedie The form of the “brief” ordinarily consists of a couplet of anapestic tetrameter with the first soft beat of each line clipped off (x / xx / xx / xx /). The anapest, which functions...

‘If a Contemporary Free-Verse Poet Wrote a Sonnet’: A Poem and Brief Essay

The Society
March 23, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
17 Comments
by James A. Tweedie   If a Contemporary Free-Verse Poet Wrote a Sonnet Today, because I’m early for Pilates, __I stop at Starbucks for a cappuccino, __But change my mind because the mocha...

What Happened to Narrative Poetry?—An Opinion Piece by James A. Tweedie

The Society
March 5, 2020
Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry, Short Stories
24 Comments
This isn’t so much an essay as it is an opinion piece where I shoot off a few words in praise of narrative poetry or, in other words, poetry that tells a story. From Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, to...

Essay: ‘Moralistic Authenticity’ by Joseph S. Salemi

The Society
March 3, 2020
Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
41 Comments
  A not infrequent problem that a poetry editor must face is a contributor’s intransigence. Sometimes this resistance is on metrical issues or diction, but there are a few poets who dig in their...

Line, Stanza & Form: An Introduction to Poetry

The Society
February 12, 2020
Beauty, Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry, Poetry Forms
3 Comments
by Michael Curtis | excerpted from Occasional Poetry Tradition grows from wisdom, from the accumulated experience of millennia; in poetic practice, our classic tradition grows from the craft of Ages. Change...

Review: Poetry by Theresa Rodriguez

The Society
November 26, 2019
Essays, Poetry, Reviews
7 Comments
by James Sale Sonnets, 2nd edition. Shanti Arts, 2020 Jesus and Eros, Bardsinger Books, 2014 Theresa Rodriguez is a relatively new and exciting poet on the pages of The Society of Classical Poets. As a...

‘Black Cat’: Derived from ‘Schwarze Katze’ by Rainer Maria Rilke

The Society
November 6, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry, Translation
7 Comments
Black Cat a poem derived from "Schwarze Katze" by Rainer Maria Rilke, as translated by Martin Hill Ortiz A crash! I spot a ghost that bumps Eliciting my startled stare. A shadow shifts; a black pelt...

Lord Byron’s Darkest Secrets and Greatest Poetry

The Society
October 19, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Humor, Poetry
12 Comments
This piece is sponsored by KidSecured by Evan Mantyk and Kathy Brellan Lord Byron was born George Gordon Byron in London on January 22, 1788 and died just 36 years later in 1824. Yet, despite his short...

Essay: Richard Wilbur, C.S. Lewis, and the Imaginative Power of Poetry

The Society
October 15, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
7 Comments
by T.M. Moore   Our Image-hungry Age Increasingly, our postmodern generation prefers its communications to be in as few words and as many images as possible. Hence, the curious success of...

Essay: ‘A Breeze Came Out of the North…’

The Society
September 29, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
6 Comments
A breeze came out of the North one day, and cried, "September's begun!" A breeze came out of the North one day, declared, "The Summer is done!" by Jack Ahlers You know the fall air—it is somehow...

Essay: On Yeats’ ‘Second Coming’ and the Power of Poetry

The Society
September 11, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, For Educators, Poetry
45 Comments
by T.M. Moore I had just finished teaching one of the adult classes at our church on the meaning of Christmas, using John Milton’s Ode on the Morning of Christ’s Nativity as my text. We examined many...

Poetry, Beauty and the Modern Era: Essay by James Sale

The Society
August 12, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Epic, Essays, Poetry
20 Comments
  One interesting question is ‘why poetry, specifically?’ I am currently writing an ‘epic’ called The English Cantos, and I have chosen to write my epic in terza rima. There are many forms of...

A Straight Shooter: Interview with C.B. Anderson

The Society
July 31, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Interviews, News of Note, Poetry
2 Comments
Roots in the Sky, Boots on the Ground: Metaphysical Poems C.B. Anderson, Kelsay Books, 107 pages paperback, ISBN-10: 1949229688 2019, $17.00 by Carol Smallwood Smallwood: Joseph S. Salemi commented on...

Rediscovering the Sonnet: An Interview with Poet Theresa Rodriguez by Carol Smallwood

The Society
July 10, 2019
Essays, Interviews, Poetry, Poetry Forms
7 Comments
  This interview was conducted by Carol Smallwood with poet Theresa Rodriguez following the release of the first edition of Sonnets by Rodriguez; the second edition is published by Shanti Arts, 2020;...

The Rebirth of Poetry Is Here: First SCP Symposium Held

The Society
June 28, 2019
Essays, From the Society, News of Note, Poetry, Symposium
21 Comments
The Society of Classical Poets successfully holds its first symposium in New York City (Press Release)   NEW YORK—A growing movement is calling for the return of meter and rhyme in poetry in a bid...

‘A Poet’s Lament’ and Poetry by Joe Tessitore

The Society
May 17, 2019
Beauty, Culture, Essays, Poetry
19 Comments
A Poet’s Lament - for Charles Southerland, whose brilliant prose style I so painfully tried to imitate and incorporate Nobody cried when poetry died a long, slow death - a final breath, maybe even a last...
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