Indeed, the famous eclecticism of “The Waste Land,” which incorporates quotations from multiple languages and literatures, can be seen as a tribute to the educational philosophy that governed Harvard during Eliot’s time there… Yet as Crawford shows in the impressively researched Young Eliot, the “melange of topics” that Eliot explored in college “mightily enriched his poetry.” […]
Poets
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Fairyland: Memories of a Singular San Francisco Girlhood
Alysia Abbott recalls being raised by her poet father—a single, openly gay man—in the San Francisco of the nineteen-seventies and eighties.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
Who Was the Poet Frank Stanford?
With the recently released What About This: Collected Poems of Frank Stanford, the work of a brilliant, difficult, much-mythologized and little-known American poet is finally widely available. Frank Stanford’s short life was a study in contradictions: his childhood was divided between the privilege of an upper-crust Memphis family and summers deep in the Mississippi Delta; he was a […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
A ’60s Poet, Mixing Images of Asia and Africa with Bohemian London
[Rosemary] Tonks’s first poetry collection, Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms, was published in 1963; her second and final one, Iliad of Broken Sentences, in 1967. She interweaves images of her years in Asia and Africa with snapshots of bohemian London: desert oases and mirages, jazz and cocktails. True to the first collection’s title, the poems carry a […]