Arthur Hugh Clough (1819 – 1861) Margaret Drabble on “Say not the struggle naught availeth” This poem by Arthur Hugh Clough unfailingly brings tears to my eyes. It speaks of hope, and effort, and disappointment, and per- severance. As I read it, it is a poem about social hope, about hope for humanity. Most of… Read More Say Not the Struggle Nought Availeth
Bertold Brecht (1898-1956) I came into the cities in a time of disorderAs hunger reigned.I came among men in a time of turmoilAnd I rose up with them.And so passedThe time given to me on earth. I ate my food between slaughters.I lay down to sleep among murderers.I tended to love with abandon.I looked upon… Read More Bertold Brecht: To Posterity (1938) / Pablo Neruda: Nuevo Canto de Amor a Stalingrado (1942) / Victory: Ilya Ehrenburg, 9 May 1945
Stephen Harding on the Modernist Poet and His Fascist Politics By the spring of 1939, the widely acknowledged dean of Anglo-American Modernist poetry, fifty-three-year-old Ezra Pound, had lived in Europe for three decades. After leaving the United States in 1908 at the age of twenty- three, the poet had initially settled in London, then moved… Read More Literary Celebrity, Mussolini’s Mouthpiece, and American Traitor: Who Was Ezra Pound?
Beneath English trees I meditated on that lost maze: I imagined it inviolate and perfect at the secret crest of a mountain; I imagined it erased by rice fields or beneath the water; I imagined it infinite, no longer composed of octagonal kiosks and returning paths, but of rivers and provinces and kingdoms . .… Read More The Garden of Forking Paths (1941)
NB: The bitter pain inflicted upon the Palestinian people over the past two years, and indeed for over eight decades remains with many of us. It continues to unfold. We can only hope that the people of the world will see this terrible and undeserved fate for what it is; and (especially) make amends to… Read More Wallace Stevens: Meditation Celestial and Terrestrial
The most beautiful thing in the world is, of course, the world itself Perhaps the truth depends on a walk around the lake. Wallace Stevens’ “Description without Place” was composed for and delivered at the Phi Beta Kappa ceremony at Harvard in 1946. Here are a few lines from this remarkably abstract but in fact… Read More Wallace Stevens: Description without place (1946)
A very unusual song, both for its lyrics and its melody. It comes at the end of a new film with a superb child actor, Ana Sophia Heger, in She Rides Shotgun. Quite something. This is a Scottish group Clearest Blue Song by CHVRCHES ‧ 2015 Light is all over usLike it always wasLike it… Read More Clearest Blue
By Paul Celan – Translated By Dean Rader Black milk of daybreak we drink it at dusk we drink it at noon in mornings we drink it at night we drink and we drink we dig a grave in the sky there is plenty of room A man lives in the house he plays with his snakes… Read More Paul Celan: Todesfuge
By Tennessee Williams (1911-1983) We have not long to love.Light does not stay.The tender things are thosewe fold away.Coarse fabrics are the onesfor common wear.In silence I have watched youcomb your hair.Intimate the silence,dim and warm.I could but did not, reachto touch your arm.I could, but do not, breakthat which is still.(Almost the faintest whisperwould be… Read More We Have Not Long to Love
Two of the most soulful love ballads of the 1980’s. This is a tribute for the broken people. I think tonight / We can take what was wrong and make it right The Cars – Drive Who’s gonna tell you whenIt’s too late?Who’s gonna tell you thingsAren’t so great? You can’t go onThinking nothing’s wrong,… Read More Drive / Broken Wings
After the truth-shower 