Eager Imagination

Kenneth Burke argues for the importance of desire in the functioning of literature. More specifically, he sees a text as a structure that wo...

Wallace Stevens presents an interesting problem for critics.  On the one hand, he emphasizes the power of the human imagination, but he unde...

I believe it is important, on occasion, to say “we” in literary criticism. Here is an example: "We notice the high speed, the succe...

In Scepticism and Animal Faith , George Santayana conducts an interesting -- and revealing -- thought experiment. He undercuts what he sees ...

In section two of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. sets up a stark contrast between good and evil: "Evil was active in the land,...

T. S. Eliot's reaction to Andrew Marvell's poetry is particularly helpful in understanding Eliot's views on how emotion works in...

In section six of "The Walls Do Not Fall," H.D. employs the worm as a symbol for human persistence: "In me (the worm) clearly...

"Death by Water," Section IV of "The Waste Land," is by far the shortest individual section of the poem, but it seems in...

Cyrena N. Pondrom's "T.S. Eliot: The Performativity of Gender in The Waste Land " is a very useful and provocative essay, but ...

It is especially provocative to read the following quote from Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets" when considering how frag...

The Waste Land is a complex and allusive poem. As Eliot's notes indicate (and an avalanche of scholarship confirms), a full reading of ...

Meillassoux provides a unique history of philosophy, splitting philosophers into two grops: pre-Kantians (who believe in objects themselves)...

H.D. seems to advance a notion of subjectivity worth examining in section four of "The Walls Do Not Fall." She uses an extended me...

Nicholas Mayer brings much careful research to his paper "Catalyzing Prufrock," but one gets the sense that he ended up with his i...

I've just begun reading H.D.'s long poem "The Walls Do Not Fall," which is the first of three long poems comprising "...

Michael Levenson, in his A Genealogy of Modernism , brings a very careful analysis of narration and narrative perspective to the texts he ex...

Charles Altieri's important book on postmodern poetry Enlarging the Temple presents a conundrum for the uninitiated. In this case...tha...

I came across a poem online today, at Anti-, by Amit Majmudar. It's called "Money Shots" and begins with the following lines:...

It's a stale and obvious fact that Wallace Stevens places great faith in what the imagination could accomplish. He feels that the imagi...

I was looking over several unpublished poems and drafts by Elizabeth Bishop and was struck by a commonality that may shed light on her ideas...

"A Country Life" by Randall Jarrell expresses concisely in one of its lines an overriding principle of Jarrell's work: "T...

Jean-Paul Sartre makes a compelling argument about the nature of self-consciousness. In the introduction to Being and Nothingness , Sartre s...

Wallace Stevens' poem "Flyer's Fall" contemplates the persistence of belief in a culture marked by the loss of doctrinal f...

Randall Jarrell's poem "A Ward in the States" is a haunting examination of the mind's inability to unify itself and place ...

I’ve been thinking more about Charles Altieri’s contention that postmodern poetry is primarily about the need to express one’s experience of...

In his "Field and Forest," Randall Jarrell strips man of civilization in order to get down to the root of instinct. The agricultu...

Randall Jarrell is particularly interested in the intersection of the self and the social world. In "90 North," he takes the conc...

It has been productive to begin reading Bishop's short stories because they help emphasize aspects of her poetry. Specifically, stories...

Every now and again you find a poem that seems anachronistic or a very early precursor to a movement that takes shape later. Theodore Roeth...

Elizabeth Bishop's "The Weed" is a great poem to read using Structuralist and New Critical methods. She builds two related an...