Essays

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 traditional haiku should... 1. Be three lines. The first line should have five syllables, the second seven syllables, the third five syllables. Seventeen syllables total. 2. Contain...

by Conrad Geller People are always asking "What are the best love poems?" or "Where can I find something beautiful to say to the woman I love?" or "...to the man I love?" If you are looking for love poems in...

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...

By Conrad Geller Poets demonstrably know nothing about death since it is, in Hamlet’s phrase, “the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns.” Yet from the Egyptian Book of the Dead...

By James Sale This is a curious collection from Douglas Thornton: ambitious, epic in its style, containing many great lines and ideas, but also strangely baffling, quirky, and—I have to say—awkward....

By Sharon Kilarski | Originally Published in The Epoch Times A sonnet by Betsy Hughes offers unmistakable relief; you can actually understand what you are reading. Words in glistening, clear images form...

By Douglas Thornton "And lo I lie between the sun and thee" (Venus and Adonis; line 194) To see the poet in the act of composition, to hear his words tell not only the story, but with imaginative zeal,...

By James Sale In our egalitarian and democratic societies we very much hope and want all good things to be available to all people if they have a mind to have them. Indeed, in the world of personal...

By James Sale Poetry is a delicate balance of language that is prone to either too much yin or too much yang; or put another way, as the poet steers his or her course like Odysseus towards his true soul,...

By Wilbur Dee Case | Edited by Kent Van May Now I can see why T.S. Eliot disliked Edgar Allan Poe's verse; Eliot was trying to write a different kind of poetry; and it is no surprise that, for Eliot, Poe...

See full Epoch Times article on Robert...

By Damian Robin Quick, pick a good book of poems and let your soul soar. Or clip in your ear buds and listen to words by the score. Or rack up some speakers and loudly let rhetoric roar — it’s April,...

By Dusty Grein and Evan Mantyk “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe remains one of the English language’s most popular and influential poems since it was written in 1845. Much of this was Poe’s own doing,...

By Kristina Pentchoukova Right from the first email from William Ruleman, I knew that I was interacting with a classicist who upheld traditional English in all manner of communication and behavior. Every...

By James Sale There are two things I don’t like about “When We Were Slugs”, the new poetry collection from James Manlow, the erstwhile Poet Laureate for Bournemouth, England (pictured above). The...

by Reid McGrath I forewarn you that these are the 10 greatest English Sonnets addressed to or concerning other poets and are not even the 10 greatest short poems concerning other poets. There are innumerable...

By Dusty Grein Most of us enjoy poetry in one form or another. I am going to attempt to lay out the basics of writing classical style poetry in English, based on standard poetry terms and references. This...

By James Sale Frederick Glaysher claims to be an epic poet, and furthermore to have written an epic poem, The Parliament of Poets. This is a huge claim and an astonishing ambition. Is he? Has he? Before...

Updated: April 26, 2024 10 Greatest Poems Ever Written An Ambitious "Best Poems" List Limited to Poems Originally Written in English and of 50 Lines or Less by Evan Mantyk What is poetry? What is great...

Updated January 9, 2020 A Quick Sonnet Guide.  A traditional sonnet should have... 14 lines. X Rhyming. The most common is the Shakespearean rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. These 14  letters...

Review By James Sale This weekend two different things coincided. First, I finished reading ‘Poetry Is: Jose Garcia Villa’s Philosophy of Poetry’ edited by Robert L King (Ateneo University Press),...

Poetry, arguably the most powerful form of communication ever devised by mankind, has died. It was thousands of years old. Poetry died yesterday after a prolonged illness. Trapped in a meaningless,...

When you are 62 years old things may begin to be clearer; you begin realise to the full extent what territory you are in and demarcating; and I now know what for me is important in poetry and has always been...

There are a number of reasons for writing poetry, and alas they are not all good; for not all poetry is good, and indeed some ‘poetry’ is not poetry at all. This is not to denigrate anyone’s effort, but...

Imagine that you were lost in a wilderness and had to find your way out. Fortunately, you have with you a number of things, or tools if you will. In the first instance you have a kitbag, which is itself...

“He strove to resuscitate the dead art/Of poetry; to maintain "the sublime"/In the old sense. Wrong from the start  …” –Ezra Pound, “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly” “Adolf Hitler was a Jeanne d'Arc, a...

Verse Forms as Evokers of Poetry I wish to dispute the notion that a “poem” arrives in the formal poet’s mind as if it were a compressed computer file, which he or she then expands into the poem...

Review By Christopher Nield / Image by Liza Voronin/The Epoch Times The Riddles of Merlin As I was walking Alone by the sea, “What is that whisper?” Said Merlin to me. “Only,” I...

Poetry should be metered, because metered poetry is, quite simply, better than free verse.  This is for the same reason that realist art trumps impressionist art and that Baroque music trumps rock and roll...

  By Kara Lysandra Ross I was in Epcot Center in Disney World last year, and in the Innovations Center they had a computerized survey, which had already been taken by thousands of people. The survey...

. Writing Classical Poetry Is Easy(at Least to Begin With) by Evan Mantyk There is very little difficulty behind writing classical poetry from a technical perspective. Classical poetry is simply poetry that is...