Essays

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (born February 27, 1807 - died March 24, 1882) was an American poet of the Romantic period. He served as a professor at Harvard University and was an adept linguist, traveling...

By Annabelle Fuller John Keats (born October 31, 1795 - died February 23, 1821) began life as the son of a stable-owner, and ended it as an unmarried, poor and tuberculosis-ridden young man. Somewhere along...

By Sam Gilliland The Poisoned Chalice Let he who lips me then beware, My potion’s more than honeyed mead, One sip, I shall your soul ensnare, Death conquers all, so take you heed! It is a foolhardy...

By Con Chapman Boston may no longer be the Hub of the Universe, but its Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area remains the undisputed capital of America in at least one respect—home of suicidal...

Any treatise claiming critical review of verse, whether in the widest sense, or, as in this case, the result of compressed choice, purely down to the author’s own consideration, I hasten to add, is probably...

The poetry of Fray Angelico Chavez can be read here. By Joseph Charles MacKenzie Fray Angélico Chávez, O.F.M. (1910-1996) remains the most important poet of New Mexico’s modern history. It is precisely...

by Dusty Grein The Man The American poet Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, CA. He spent his first 40 years mostly unknown, and it wasn’t until after returning to the United...

John Milton (Born December 9, 1608 – died November 8, 1674) was an English poet of the late Renaissance period. He is most noted for his epic poem on the fall of Satan and Adam and Eve’s ejection from the...

By David Gosselin The answer to the above question is of course no. Shakespeare and Dante are not dead because every true poet is immortal. However, much of our contemporary thinkers seem to be under the...

An Introduction to Poetry and Its Place in an Integral Human Formation Introduction  It is well known to most sensible educators that one of the fundamental goals of their profession is the so-called...

by Jane Blanchard Beatrice, Dante Alighieri’s second guide in La Divina Commedia (The Divine Comedy), makes her literary debut in an earlier work, La Vita Nuova (The New Life), a combination of prose and...

Click here to download the entire book as a pdf file. By Leonard Dabydeen In the fraternity of poetic minds we can luxuriate joyously on the richness of old age, or on becoming old but fresh as sunshine...

By Joseph Charles MacKenzie, for the Society of Classical Poets Born in 1939 Samuel Gilliland attended the ancient Dreghorn School in an old mining village on the right bank of the river Irvine, said...

By James Sale Donald Mace Williams Wolfe and Other Poems is an extraordinarily good collection of poems, clearly written by a veteran writer. The underlying credo of the collection is very aptly summed...

Poetry, as we have discussed in earlier parts of this article series, depends upon the Muses and accessing the deeper self or soul within each person; this is not an easy thing to do. In the 18th century Lord...

By Joshua Philipp Abbie Farwell Brown described the far north in his 1902 book, "In The Days of Giants," as "the land of the midnight sun, where summer is green and pleasant, but winter is a terrible time...

This essay was written in 2007 and has remained unpublished until now. by Ludiew E. Sarceb Few of the contemporary poets with whom I am familiar have any profound sense of history (and, therefore, of our...

It has long been observed that whilst the ego is useful in making daily and ordinary decisions in our life, it is less effective when it comes to more important issues; it is by nature competitive, and it...

By Joshua Philipp The poetry of John Keats is known for its light and dreamy nature. Even in his time, in the early 1800s, he was considered old-fashioned, both in his topics and in his style of writing. He...

The Muses we understand from Part 1 of this article are the daughters of the future and the past, and more specifically of memory, light, truth and beauty; they are essential for the ‘good life’, and we...

By Joshua Philipp The Italian poet Dante Alighieri is best known for his journey into hell, purgatory, and heaven which he told of in his "Divine Comedy." But before he took that journey, he took a very...

By Sandeep Kumar Mishra There are two things that came to my mind when I read the book Hare Krishna by Mahathi: First, in this modern era in which every person thinks himself a poet, the shape, size and...

By Joseph Charles MacKenzie James Sale, whom I happen to consider England’s best on the subject, states: “To write poetry with any degree of power, and to create true beauty without which the effort is...

We live in a post-modernist world and its values are everywhere around us; and everywhere these values are almost largely unexamined, and because we have little to contrast our present state with we fail to...

By Joshua Philipp The Japanese creation story begins in a time of primordial chaos, and from this the god Izanagi and the goddess Izanami emerge to create the Japanese islands. This is the first tale in The...

By Evan Mantyk A veritable Renaissance woman, Sally Cook is both an accomplished poet who's regularly published in National Review and an accomplished artist whose paintings are on display at the...

Click here to listen to Sonnet 32 read by Ian Russell who has been nominated for an Audie for his reading. By James Sale It was Stephen Fry who said of the sonnet: “The ability to write them...

By Alex Phuong The night sky has served as the inspiration for many poets and writers, from Longfellow’s “The Light of Stars” to “Stars” by Robert Frost, and still does. Profoundly and...

By Sandeep Kumar Mishra and Evan Mantyk English poetry has a rich history dating back at least 1,400 years. Looking at poetry today, it is easy to get trapped into thinking that the flurry of poetic...

By Evan Mantyk In the sea of free verse, drifting downward into the bottomless whirlpool of aesthetic relativism, it is hard to not get lost; but poet, editor, and professor Joseph S. Salemi seems to have...

By James Sale There are nine Muses of poetry, daughters of Zeus or some say Apollo, and the Titaness, Mnenosyne, goddess of memory, past and future. And of these nine the most important is Kalliope, she of...

By Evan Mantyk Last year, the College Board released a significantly redesigned Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT). The SAT is used by millions of student applicants each year to gain admission to U.S....

By Wilbur Dee Case One of the most unlikely poems of the Modernist period is that by Robert Frost: "The Pasture." It is unlikely for many reasons. First, it seems more like a Romantic lyric, i.e., one...

By Evan Mantyk One week in mid-January this year, in the relatively obscure world of poetry, Joseph Charles MacKenzie’s “Pibroch for the Domnhall” exploded like an atomic bomb, shattering...

By Evan Mantyk WHAT DOES THE classic Chinese story Journey to the West have to do with William Shakespeare’s classic play Hamlet? A lot it turns out. Both Hamlet and Journey to the West were...

By Evan Mantyk From The Iliad, Beowulf, and Shakespearean literature in the West to the Chinese Classic of Poetry, the Indian Ramayana, and the Middle Eastern Epic of Gilgamesh, classical poetry is the...

By Jane Blanchard On December 5, 1830, Christina Rossetti was born in London to an Italian-English mother married to an Italian poet in exile.  The youngest of four children, all of whom grew up to be...

A Quick Haiku Guide. A haiku should... Be three lines of five syllables, seven syllables, and five syllables. Contain a nature or seasonal reference. Be in the present tense (swims...

By Conrad Geller Well, here I am again, unbowed by the heartfelt, sometimes urgent suggestions for altering my recent “10 Greatest Poems about Death.” This time I choose a topic—love—less grim if...

By Evan Mantyk Michael Curtis A classical architect, sculptor, painter, and poet, Michael Curtis is, in no uncertain terms, a Renaissance man. He has taught and lectured at universities, colleges, and...