The beauty of poetry is the scope it offers for the imagination. The unthinkable becomes alive through words, and the unimaginable animates in front of our mind's eye. One device to achieve this is ...

The Incarnation, and Passion Lord, when Thou didst Thyself undress, Laying by Thy robes of glory, To make us more, Thou wouldst be less, And becam’st a woful story. To put on clouds instead of light, ...

Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) was an English poet and, like John Donne and George Herbert, he is considered one of the major metaphysical poets. Like these two poets, too, Crashaw was an Anglican priest ...

The ravaged settings in which many of D. Nurkse’s new poems take place — including New York on 9/11 — seem perfectly matched to the grizzled, Herman Melville–esque visage in his author photo. Clearly, ...

Having never missed an issue in more than a century, the Sewanee Review is the oldest continuously published literary quarterly in the country. Begun in 1892 at The University of the South in Sewanee, ...

Metaphysical Dog is winner of the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Award. Long a source of trepidation for Bidart, questions of the body and its suitability to human consciousness pervade ...

Death mark of the poet John Donne, engraved by Martin Droeshout, London 1632. (Photo by Bettmann / Getty) During the 16th century, the English were unusually spirited in their destruction of Catholics ...

Contributing writer for The Prospect Michael Grasso details Princeton professor in creative writing Patricia Smith’s ...

During World War II the Allied forces in Europe had trouble maintaining a staff of cryptographers. There were few who could do the difficult work of deciphering enemy codes. Some got killed and others ...