I promised this post on Robert Frost’s “Birches” in the event that we have an ice storm. I don’t know yet whether we will have one, but we had frozen rain for much of the night, and as I write this (Wednesday morning) we are being attacked by a blizzard. So if I don’t arrange […]
First of all, a happy birthday to Jane Austen (thanks to my mother for pointing this out). Jane would have been 234 today. My students have been bothered by the Marianne-Brandon marriage that concludes Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, and I’m inclined to agree with them. Kat Vander Wende reasonably pointed out that the sought-after […]
When my wife and I leave the house in the morning, I will sometimes call out to her, “One kiss, my bonnie sweetheart” and we will embrace before going our separate ways. I suspect you recognize the line, which is from one of the English language’s most beloved poems, Alfred Noyes’s “The Highwayman.” I write […]
Since I’ve been writing a lot about the longing for lost innocence in the past few weeks, I’ll share a couple of personal stories about the subject. Included are a traumatic creative writing experience that drove me away forever from writing serious poetry again and a very strange moment in my courtship of the woman […]
