First Known When Lost

William Wordsworth's meditation on the soothing qualities of moving water leads me to one of my favorite poems by Wallace Stevens.  (Co...

Carrying further the observations of Philip Larkin and Patrick Kavanagh on the beneficent qualities of water, let us consider a poem writt...

Patrick Kavanagh's "Is," which appeared in my previous post, contains these lines:  "Mention water again/Always virginal...

After being successfully treated for lung cancer in 1954 and 1955, Patrick Kavanagh entered a sort of euphoric era in his poetry.  We saw th...

Sages often counsel us to avoid too much thinking.  This is a piece of advice that we hear from the Stoics on one side of the world to the T...

I have not forgotten my earlier promise to share Philip Larkin's thoughts on the fifties.  (The years of one's life, not the decade...

At times a poem becomes so familiar that one has difficulty seeing it, hearing it, and feeling it freshly.  I have lately been dipping into ...

Musing upon being in one's fifties is, after all, part of a bigger game.  As William Wordsworth reminds us, how one inhabits the years ...

For Philip Larkin, the baleful influence of "modernism" on 20th century culture was embodied in "the three Ps":  Pound, ...

This year I find myself at the midpoint of my fifties.  Mind you, I have no complaints.  Unlike Dante midway through his life's journey,...