The Modern Element in Poetry: Essays on Contemporary Poetry Adam Kirsch W.W. Norton & Company $18.47 at Amazon Among the few books of general literary criticism that I have read in the last five years, none has compared with Adam Kirsch’s The Modern Element: Essays in Contemporary Poetry. Kirsch, a true modern man of letters, [...]
Archive for January, 2010
Review of Adam Kirsch’s The Modern Element
Posted in Literary Criticism, Poetry, Poetry and Life, tagged Adam Kirsch, Book Review, Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Literary Criticism, Poetry, The Modern Element on January 23, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Milosz Poem
Posted in Poetry, Poetry and Life, tagged Czeslaw Milosz, Holy Spirit, Human Vision, Poetry on January 23, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Veni Creator Come, Holy Spirit, bending or not bending the grasses, appearing or not above our heads in a tongue of flame, at hay harvest or when they plough in the orchards or when snow covers crippled firs in the Sierra Nevada. I am only a man: I need visible signs. I tire easily, building [...]
A Lyric Virtue
Posted in Uncategorized on January 16, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Despite a volley of rhetoric over the last three centuries, our lives still stretch into dark places. What I mean to say is that our lives are still shrouded in mystery, that the demands of living as a human—as opposed to say a mere animal or thing—cannot be reduced to mere calculus. Reductive descriptions of [...]
The Base of All Metaphysics
Posted in Poetry, Whitman on January 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
And now gentlemen, A word I give to remain in your memories and minds, As base and finale too for all metaphysics. (So to the students the old professor, At the close of his crowded course.) Having studied the new and antique, the Greek and Germanic systems, Kant having studied and stated, Fichte and Schelling [...]
