THE more I read the current discussion of poets and poetry, the more I am worried by the conviction that it is proceeding on false assumptions. The writers may have different tastes, belong to ...

The tone was set early. It was afternoon at the Poetry Project’s New Year’s Day Marathon, the 50th since the event’s debut in 1974. After an hour and a half or so of poems, the day’s topic had come ...

Poetry in the 21st century is both ubiquitous and oddly peripheral. Verses are displayed on subway walls, recited on momentous occasions, and served up in giant fonts on social media, but rarely do ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

In the poetry marketplace, her praise had reputation-making power, while her disapproval could be withering. By William Grimes Helen Vendler, one of the leading poetry critics in the United States, ...

Maya Angelou, considered one of the best poets in history, signs copies of "Maya Angelou: Letter to My Daughter" at Barnes & Noble in Union Square on October 30, 2008 in New York City. Poetry is a ...

When Plato was an infant, bees alighted on his lips and, nestling there, set about making honey. His parents had placed him, sleeping, on the summit of a mountain while they paid tribute to the gods, ...

Our columnist selects the books that have stuck with her this year. By Elisa Gabbert Reading a lot of books in one genre, too close together, can start to drive you senseless, the way saying the same ...

Robert Frost presented himself as a simple man. Not for him the literary circles of London or the stilted dinner parties of Brahmin Boston. Nor was he at home in academia. He dropped out of college ...