In “The Confinement of Free Verse” (May, 1987), Mr. Brad Leithauser argues that the poet makes a “prosodic contract” with the reader and that as free verse makes no such contract it is bankrupt. I ...

Why is Christian Science in our name? Our name is about honesty. The Monitor is owned by The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and we’ve always been transparent about that. The church publishes the ...

If free verse is to release the poetry that is in daily speech, it may well follow that our prose, too, will feel a quickening breath of beauty; and a glint of the glory from the wings of song will ...

"Something positive emerging from the recession" – this was one of the many online responses to a book fair held last year in Clerkenwell, London, for poetry publishers to present their work direct to ...

It's always dispiriting when an artist you admire enormously comes out with an opinion that strikes you as completely wrongheaded. So it was, for me, on reading Wendy Cope's views in last week's ...

What weeping face is that looking from the window? Why does it stream those sorrowful tears? Is it for some burial place, vast and dry? Is it to wet the soil of graves? This poem is written in free ...

I hope to vanish, with a modest flourish, from this essay in a moment. Since my interest here lies in universal literary questions, I suspect that any appearance of the first-person singular may well ...

Alan Filreis’s Counter-Revolution of the Word is less a work of literary interpretation than a penetrating historical and sociological study. It is comparable to now-classic books like Jed Rasula’s ...