First Known When Lost

This year, as autumn has turned, two phrases have been recurring to me. First:  "Slow, slow!"  (From Robert Frost's " Oct...

On several occasions in his poetry and prose Edward Thomas describes enigmatic meetings with strangers encountered during his walks through ...

There is a plainspoken serenity to traditional Chinese lyrical poetry that provides a beautiful counterpoint to the ofttimes declamatory and...

Back in August , I mentioned a row of maple trees that I pass beside in my walks through a marina.  At that time, the trees provided one of ...

One of my afternoon walks takes me through a former army post (now a park) that is located on the bluffs beside Puget Sound.  During the Sec...

We never know which poems will set us on the road to loving poetry.  I was a late starter:  it was not until my freshman year of college tha...

"The most prosaic man becomes a poem when you stand by his grave at his funeral and think of him."  Thomas Hardy (notebook entry, ...

A point of clarification at the outset:  this post is not about the grandiosity, narcissism, and solipsism of human beings, whether in the p...

Why is it that certain poems dwell within us for years?  Have no fear!  I am not planning to launch into a meditation on "the art of po...

The Greek Anthology is, to a great degree, a chronicle of "change and chancefulness" (Thomas Hardy, "The Temporary the All...