Activity

I could say to students: if you substitute imagination for love, you have in hand one of Wallace Stevens’s persistent thoughts about the world, and our experience of it, and the nature of knowledge. Bronze then becomes a word to think about, the bronzes of autumnal New England and the sun-gilded br…

In talking about this with Judith, I was able to quote a haiku that I love by the nineteenth-century poet Kobayashi Issa, which goes like this—seventeen syllables in the Japanese:

     The man pulling radishes  
   Pointed my way  
     With a radish.

Can you imag…

[...] I remember an experience of standing in the library in my freshmen year of college and picking up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and reading in it and feeling complete incomprehension and a desire to be able to comprehend it or to find someone who could explain it to me, open it up for me, so in…

[...] I remember an experience of standing in the library in my freshmen year of college and picking up T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and reading in it and feeling complete incomprehension and a desire to be able to comprehend it or to find someone who could explain it to me, open it up for me, so in…

for readers of poetry or gazers at paintings or films, listeners to music, for all of us who have found there comfort and consolation and instruction, unnervings, adumbrations of meaning, echoes of intuitions we hadn’t even understood that we had