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While Ghalib's poetry contains the delicate, evanescent moods and divided self-consciousness one associates with periods of decline, it also embodies the opposite, an arrogant rhetorical vehemence and originality that at times calls to mind John Donne more than any of his Western contemporaries.
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I daresay Pierre Reverdy is the favorite French poet among American poets. But how well do we really know his work?
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In 1913, the young Walter Benjamin struck up an intense friendship with the poet Christoph Friedrich Heinle — one of the most enigmatic episodes in Benjamin’s enigmatic life.
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What is “language writing” anyway?
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What in the world is art worth?
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Thanks to Blood Meridian, I’ve learned, at least temporarily, the meanings of “quirt,” “pritchel,” and even the seemingly ultra-rare “malandered.”
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An artist’s fame may continue, or even grow, as the actual works on which it is nominally based are lost from sight.
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George Seferis's mercurial tone can turn on a dime from lyricism to humor and back again, just as his characters shuttle between sensual abandon and neurotic self-flagellation.
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Encore un effort on Lefebvre. My first go was nothing but objections. Round two started out with admiration but I soon found myself airing further criticism — almost against my will...
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“Information is increasing while direct contacts are in decline. Relations are becoming more numerous while their intensity and authenticity are diminishing,” wrote Henri Lefebvre in 1961, and by 1981 he understood that this would entail “a solitude all the more profound for being overwhelmed by mes
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Reflected in sentences of throbbing beauty, the blind urge to self-destruction becomes a visionary quest
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The writings of Karl Marx will always remain a source of insight and inspiration, but vast swaths of the Marxist literature that exerted such a fascination when I was younger now seem barren of interest.