With solemnity, grace and a little defensiveness, this Grand Old Man of Letters reads, discusses and defends his choices. For all his well-known peevishness, he emerges as an ardent, engaged lover of ...

I have been moving books between one house and another, doing a quinquennial cull to donate to libraries. In flux, I can’t make a firm census of the poetry books I cannot bear to do without, but there ...

Bloom made his critical reputation with a book called The Anxiety of Influence, where he argued that poetry proceeds on the misreadings by strong poets of their predecessors. In this massive anthology ...

The publication of Vladimir Nabokov's Selected Poems is a major literary event. The great, grand and much missed novelist (Lolita, Pale Fire) was "first a poet," as the book's editor Thomas Karshan ...

As usual, The Best Poems is an odd collection. About fifty per cent of it is the blending of high-minded sentiment and low-rating technical capacity which adds up to complete mediocrity in poetry. But ...

While poetry might seem like the realm of intellectuals, this literary domain is vast, encompassing everything from the love poems we send our sweethearts on Valentine’s Day to the funeral poems we ...

Poetry essentially is figurative language, concentrated so that its form is both expressive and evocative. Figuration is a departure from the literal, and the form of a great poem itself can be a ...