Like the religious service for which this romantic collection is named, An Evensong employs poetic forms within an ecclesiastical context as it endeavors to order and make meaning of our broken world. Using characters and settings as varied as monks in medieval monasteries, middle-aged sons in suburban shopping malls, poets in funeral parlors, and combat veterans in college classrooms, these poems form a congregation that longs to receive grace, and yet this revelation often seems beyond mere human grasp. To assist with this mystical pursuit, the verses turn to the scriptures, mythology,...

A literary critic aspires to eloquence, though makes no pretense to mirror the sublimity of the monuments inspiring his endeavors. Poets express their wonder through works of art. Critics articulate their homage via analysis of art's workings. Hence, these essays and lectures, addressed to the quizzical, though not of necessity scholarly, reader, explore Shakespeare and noted re-envisioners of the Bard; four modern novels that interrogate identity; and underappreciated works and writers. They conclude with a series of pensees (thinkings) that, in the course of glossing nuances, reflect upon...

This series of critiques serves to help demarcate, as well as add to, three specific literary forums. The first section of the book, Modern Sonneteers, discusses the genre plied by countless pens since Petrarch's inception of the sonnet, honed by Shakespeare, and cultivated through Donne, Milton, Keats, and Wordsworth, among others, showing that it thrives still. The twentieth century yielded a second Sonnet Golden Age reminiscent of the first at the apex of the English Renaissance. Auden, Borges, Cummings, Larkin, and Stokes comprise part of the cadre of recent masters. The second part of...

This text will “make one see something new [by granting] new eyes to see with,” as Ezra Pound remarked of Imagism. Still he soon dissociated himself from the movement he helped found, to which T. S. Eliot never belonged.

Why, then, study Pound and Eliot as Imagists? As the former phrased it, to offer “language to think in” regarding their shared premium on precision; and to explicate differing reasons for this emphasis. Pound plies accuracy to carve distinctions. By carving, he sought to delineate components of a model culture. Conversely, and paradoxically, severances renderable...