I am on a detox diet that involves soaking in a bath nearly every day. Lately, I have been taking The English Language: A Historical Introduction with me. (It only took dropping my precious iPod touch into sudsy water once to break me of my previous habit.) Aside from the occasional snide remark about pronunciations …
“Go forth: amidst our chaffinch flock display Thy plumage of far wonder and heavenward flight!” -Robert Bridges Reading “Poems 1876-89” in The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Fourth Edition), it struck me how much of his verse was not necessarily much more technically interesting than other poets of the Nineteenth century. What remains remarkable are …
Contemporary sonnets are not easy to write. Yet some have done it surprisingly well. Of the poems I liked best toward the latter half of this anthology, there seemed to be three general types of poems that employed either dense music to drown out the form; an “absurd” subject matter juxtaposed against the intricate, labyrinthine …
