title

RIMBAUD

Part 1:

One hundred years after the death of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud(1854-1891), a French poet, I was just beginning to find my way in the world of poetry. Rimbaud influenced modern literature and arts, inspired various musicians, and prefigured surrealism. He started writing poems at a very young age while still in primary school, and stopped completely before he turned 21. He was mostly creative in his late teens. His "genius, its flowering, explosion ...

JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

JOHN ASHBERY

Part 1:

Stephen Burt, a poet and Harvard professor of English, has compared the now famous poet John Ashbery(1927- ) to T. S. Eliot, calling Ashbery "the last figure whom half the English-language poets alive thought a great model, and the other half thought incomprehensible." Ashbery's ncreasing critical recognition by the 1970s transformed him from an obscure avant-garde experimentalist into one of America's most important poets, though still ...

AN EXPLOSIVE PRODIGALITY

The following prose-poem arose is a result of reading a review of The Book of Disquiet published posthumously in 1982 as I was beginning that portion of my life north of the tropic of Capricorn in Australia. The work is by Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935). It is a fragmentary lifetime project which was left unedited by the author. He introduced his book as a "factless autobiography."1

This volume was reviewed by George Steiner in The ...

SOME FINE ESSAYISTS

Preamble:

Section 1:

The world has had, and now has, some fine essayists. I am not in the same league as the finest, but they set the bar for me. An essay is an experiment, not a credo. It is an exercise in working out what one thinks at a particular time and in a particular place. It is something made up, to a certain extent, in response to an excited imagination, what some might see as an overheated brain, what I see as the product ...