Averno is a small crater lake in southern Italy, regarded by the ancient Romans as the entrance to the underworld. That place gives its name to Louise Glück's te…
John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painsta…
The prose poems of the great French Symbolist, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891), have acquired enormous prestige among readers everywhere and have been a revolutionary influence on poetry in the twentieth c…
We have a marvelous, almost legendary image of the circumstances in which the composition of this great poem began. Rainer Maria Rilke was staying at Duino Castle, on a rocky headland of the Adriatic …
