The epigraph of Hill's "September Song," "born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42"--a poem that was published in Hill's second book King Log (1968) but can be most easily obtained these days in Hill's Selected Poems--places the deportation to Auschwitz of the Jewish child whom Hill makes his almost exact contemporary--the child's birthday is only a day later than Hill's own--on a day that passes this week. Read more...

The Island of the Day Before, which is set the mid-seventeenth century, captures that element of the period's magical thinking through a discussion of the powder of sympathy. The main character Roberto della Griva learns of the nature of that powder from an Englishman, Monsieur D'Igby. The powder, which is used to cure one of Roberto's acquaintances, is a variation of that famed ointment that Sir James Frazer points out in The Golden Bough some Renaissance thinkers believed could be applied to a sword to heal a wound made by that sword, an idea Roberto had heard from his tutor when he was a boy. D'Igby discounts the theory behind what Roberto had learned but maintains the practice is valuable. Read more...

The images of birth that Lawrence developed in the first two poems of a nine poem sequence called "A Life History in Harmonies and Discords" are fascinating, for while the two poems are meant to contrast Harmony and Discord, . . . each one also seems to contain elements of both. Read more...

Those of you who came to poetry obsessed, unlearned, and wanting to read everything that your previous dissolute life had prevented you from reading, as I did twenty or twenty-two years ago, may have bought, when deciding to turn to the Romantics, the Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, the old now out-of-print Oxford paperback edition with the ugly reddish-orange cover and double column text inside. Read more...

Those writing reception histories of Henry V pass over or ignore the significance--at least as I read it--of an allusion to the play that can be found in The Noble Gentleman (1625) of John Fletcher, the Jacobean playwright best known for his collaborations with Francis Beaumont. . . . What is of interest to us here is Fletcher’s parody of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech that legitimizes Henry’s invasion of France. Read more...

A book contract and how it is fulfilled may not make the most compelling story. We tend to think of the narrative in terms of a person who writes a book, gets an agent, finds a publisher, and signs a contract. The manuscript then makes its way through an editor, copy editor, possibly a fact checker--though the use of fact checkers seems to be an expense that many publishers are refusing to pay these days--and it then finally arrives at the printers, where new problems are created. The stories we tend to enjoy hearing are about the writers' struggles, perhaps with poverty or rejection or some such thing; at least those were the types of stories that always seemed to find their way onto my desk, or bed I suppose, when I was younger and led other people to assure me that one could not become a writer without the struggle. (Talent and hard work, funny enough, seems in the minds of many to be secondary; it's the hard times that lead to the production of the great works.) How an idea is turned into a book and how a manuscript winds its way toward the printer and into the hands of readers, however, can be interesting in itself. Take the story of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Read more...

Shakespeare gave his audience the responsibility of exercising its imagination and supplying his play with what it lacked. . . . Read more...

A line in Against the Day can be connected to a moment in Pynchon's life with certainty. How does Pynchon's use of the line in his life change the way we interpret it in the novel, or vice versa? Read more...

Vegetable love is a metaphysical principle that would become, if the mistress' ideals could be realized, suffused throughout the whole world, transfiguring it into a second paradise . . . , a green love in a green world, if you like. Read more...

July 25 is the 175th anniversary of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s death, making this week an appropriate one to offer a sketch of a reading of one of his most famous poems, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which is, in its own way, an environmental poem. . . . Read more...