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 funds for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal. Unfortunately she did not live to see her iconic poem cast in bronze on a plaque mounted inside […]

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 of the hard countenance of the age.” He produced a dozen novels and many shorter works. He considered parody “a step down from writing on the urinal […]

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 her, judged her sonnets the greatest since Shakespeare’s and so swept her from a domineering father, married her and convinced her to publish. She was […]

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 you sense boldness of imagination and voice. With a slight stretch you can hear the voice as President Trump’s – -f Trump were poetic.  What […]

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 his or her misdeeds in political life. In Part Two we now judge Donald Trump himself. We leave his underworld and struggle through Trump-tower Purgatory, […]

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 Roman poet Virgil, Dante first descends through many levels of hell, then ascends past many levels of sin, finally achieving redemption in multiple celestial spheres. […]

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 perhaps not.  We cannot know — but we can try to bridge the gap, reviving a familiar old voice in our own time. This is […]