THE WORLD’S BODY—John Crowe Ransom—Scribner ($2.75). There is no primer of modern poetry. Readers who are intimidated by its obscurity soon find that most prose explanations tend to become almost as ...

“The connections made with Dante are extremely varied, as if his celebrated universality has made it possible for poets to engage his work on many levels and often on utterly divergent terms,” they ...

Regular readers of the New York Times Book Review may recognize David Orr as that publication’s poetry critic — assuming they ever look at poetry criticism in the first place. Orr’s clear, ...

Modern poetry is markedly different from classic poetry. It relies less on meter and rhyme, and focuses more on biographical events and the everyday experiences of people. So why isn’t poetry more ...

Perhaps it takes a youngster, born 54 years after the publication of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" in 1922, to revive the discussion of "the modern element" in poetry. Adam Kirsch would like to be not ...

A new performance art film challenges audiences to engage with the memory of the Holocaust through poetry. Through a creative combination of audio and visual elements, it posits that poetic language ...

THERE is an air of general propitiousness about Josephine Young Case’s At Midnight on theThirty-first of March (Houghton Mifflin, $2.00) that gives it an exhilarating effect from first to last. The ...

MR. HOWELLS practices the profession of the critic somewhat half-heartedly, with little seeming care whether he is original, convincing, or even thorough. Does he suspect that his own critical work is ...

Michigan is known for its Poets on Poetry series, which collects the prose statements, interviews and poetry-related ephemera of individual contemporary poets; this anthology of frank interviews fits ...