Note: If you wish to receive, via e-mail, (1) my weekly newsletter or (2) daily copies of these posts, notify me at rrbates1951@gmail.com and indicate which you would like. I promise not to share your e-mail address with anyone. To unsubscribe, send me a follow-up email. Sunday Rosh Hashanah, when Jews do a spiritual self-assessment and take upon […]
The film “Empire of Light” is magical in part because of all the poetry recited.
Yeats’s “Easter, 1916” is a profound meditation on activism, including on the poet’s ambivalent feelings about Dublin’s Easter Rising.
Friday As tomorrow will be the 50th anniversary of the lunar landing, I went looking for literature that marked the occasion. A useful New York Times article, written 20 years after the event, surveyed the field and alerted me to the two poems that I share today. Interestingly, not much was written, leading to the […]
The humanities at the moment are reeling but society’s need for them is as urgent as ever.
As I sat by the hospital bed of a dear friend holding her hand, the well-known opening lines from Auden’s “Lullaby” came to mind:
In Auden’s “Christmas Oratorio,” the shepherds stand in for the working class, who find love and personhood in the birth of Jesus.
In which I argue with a writer who claims that art and artists have an inflated sense of their power and that they are irrelevant in the battle against Donald Trump.
