EDITED BY JOSEPH BOTTUM
Mr. Bottum is the author of eight books, including ‘An Anxious Age’ and ‘The…
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Poem of the Day: ‘A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning’
In the current cultural climate, the act of revisiting the poetic tradition with sympathy seems almost revolutionary.
Poem of the Day: ‘Bellbirds’
Australia Day has been a source of contention for the implied assumption that until 1788, Australia was a blank slate of a continent, empty and unpeopled, undiscovered by anyone until the British landed there.
Poem of the Day: ‘The Maldive Shark’
Herman Melville’s method here seems far more akin to Marianne Moore’s 20th-century process than to anything produced in the 19th century by a Longfellow or a Whittier, or even a Whitman.
Poem of the Day: ‘January 22nd, Missolonghi’
Lord Byron pictures himself as old, still capable of desire but no longer an object of others’ desire. The fire and the drive that pulls him out of aging languor is freedom for Greece.
Poem of the Day: ‘When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer’
As a general rule, Whitman’s lines generate their poetic rhythm, urgency, and cohesion not through regular patterns of meter, but via patterns of repetition and the breaking of those patterns.
Poem of the Day: ‘Night and Death’
Joseph Blanco White wrote some now mostly forgotten poetry, but this sonnet, orginally dedicated to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, should not be allowed to fade away.
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