Once, in my youth, I took a graduate philosophy seminar I thought would be about law and justice: Instead we discussed the semantic implications of punctuation marks. After class, I found myself ...

A world without poetry would be a dire thing indeed. From Dylan Thomas’s famous villanelle Do not go gentle into that good night to Shakespeare’s famous love sonnet parody, Sonnet 130, the forms of ...

As I have every year since 2014, in 2025 I set aside a couple of months to peruse the year’s books of poetry — at least those books I had on hand. In the past, I’ve titled my annual roundup — one ...

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose By any other name would smell as sweet.” — William Shakespeare, 'Romeo and Juliet' Ask most people for a list of the most illustrious poets of all time, ...

CHRISTIAN WIMAN is a poet and editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His most recent book of poems, Every Riven Thing, was published last fall by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Some existential glitch in ...

Poets have a way of incorporating other poets into their work. Our columnist approves. By Elisa Gabbert Elisa Gabbert’s collections of poetry and essays include, most recently, “Normal Distance” and ...

When Rupi Kaur’s second book “The Sun and Her Flowers” was released, my friend asked me what my thoughts were about the work. I hadn’t read it with the intention of never doing so, and when I told her ...