Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

A world without poetry would be a dire thing indeed. From Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night to Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet parody, Sonnet 130, the forms of ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. What is it about life's big and little moments that calls for a poem? At weddings. At funerals. On greeting cards. In church. On ...

Rita Ann Higgins’s Jiving with Wasps presents an indispensable mirror to death-dealing cultures of neglect and abuse. By also ...

CHRISTIAN WIMAN is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His most recent book of poems, Every Riven Thing, was published last fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Some existential glitch in ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. As quaint and graceful as medieval guilds. Grouse feathers float away on the still lake. Summer and reeds; summer ...

Safia Elhillo was a freshman in high school when she started keeping a diary to record her heartbreaks. All of her entries were poems, so if her parent ever found them, she could hide behind the ...

When people read a poem strictly for its beauty, their brains undergo a distinct three-step process that separates emotional resonance from basic reading comprehension. Researchers mapping brain ...