Tag: poetry

To prove the American proposition, we must dedicate our lives to its truth with our deeds every day, and maybe someday with our lives themselves.

However, in St. Thomas and the Forbidden Birds, James Matthew Wilson shows that the seeds of a rebirth of civilization are to be planted and nurtured in the soil of everyday life.

Her work is certainly redolent of sorrow and, as she describes it, the eternity that dwells within her. But her words also carry hope and surprising faith that she will see her son again.

But I reckon that eÞanðun can mix with Beowulf and Paradise Lost and not feel out of place.

In his brief and not altogether satisfying rejoinder to the question, “why write?” Berry says, “To serve that triumph I have done all the rest,” and he ends the poem there. “That triumph” is the triumph of the way of love, the life of silence.

How are all these entries against despair? Insofar as metaphor is an act that creates meaning, it’s an act of hope: even intractable realities can be changed by placing them in new relationships.

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first...

A skeptic’s take on such a variety of experience would chalk it up as privileged gonzo larkishness or chest-beating thrill-seeking—an understandable take, one likely partly true. But there was more to it. For I’ve not acknowledged the murders of his father and uncle; the psychic fallout in the family afterward; and his years-long struggle with drug addiction. That Mr. Kennedy had such an appetite for life despite these harrowings is considerable.

While many recognize the limits of human language and the ways it has sometimes been used to harm, they see language as capable of naming (or, at least, gesturing toward) the dance of matter and spirit that constitutes human existence.

Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love.”