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And what we make of it he leaves mostly to us. It would be easy, from his own eloquent prose, to get the impression that his vision is essentially moral, or from what has been written about him that his images were elegy or prophetic lament. But none of those things seem to me the final effect of h…

There are poems of not-knowing that are, for me, very connected to this and have the same quality. One of my favorite haiku is by Basho, who is a poet I think of as actually having many connections to Emily Dickinson. It’s a poem that takes the classic, almost cliché subject of the haiku, the middl…

In Edwin Arlington Robinson’s poem about Richard Cory, who is the envy of everyone in his New England town and in the last line of the short poem blows his brains out, we come to understand that people are not their public presentation, that their relationship to their own existence is something we…

[...] The synoptic Gospels, after all, belong to the eternity of story, as Yeats’s golden bird does. They are full of legends of the marvels of this world: the curing of lepers, the multiplication of loaves and fishes, the man who walked on water and died and rose from the dead. Though these same s…

[...] In the twentieth century terrorism became, largely through the innovations of aerial bombardment by airplane and guided missile, the principal means by which states waged war. Hiroshima is, in that way, the century’s hinge. It was a straightforward terrorist attack on the civilian population …