Author Archives: Jeff Balch

Last week the country became reacquainted with Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus.”   Ms. Lazarus, born 170 years ago last month, wrote the sonnet in 1883 to help raise […]

Ernest Hemingway, born 120 years ago next week, powerfully influenced the imagination and literary style of his time. His 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature lauded fiction that “reproduces the genuine features […]

Elizabeth Barrett Browning died 158 years ago this week, after composing some of the loveliest verse of the 19th century. Robert Browning, who fell for her poetry and then for […]

Tomorrow marks the 200th birthday of Walt Whitman, perhaps America’s first world poet. Whitman’s unrhymed compositions mixed transcendentalism with earthiness, and biblical cadences with sexual frankness. When you read him […]

In Part One (“Unfairno,” March 20) we witnessed several of President Trump’s aides and cheering squad-members banished to the Infernal depths as Easter approached. Each suffered a doom proportional to […]

The next three columns are based on The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri. Dante’s Comedy, narrated in a colorful and musical Italian, unfolds over several days culminating with Easter in the year 1300. Guided by the […]

Ten presidents ago, on the occasion of John F. Kennedy’s inauguration, the poet Robert Frost offered a recitation.  Were he alive today, perhaps he would celebrate President Trump similarly.  Or […]