Poetry is often said to resist translation, its integration of form and meaning rendering even the best translations problematic. Elizabeth Marie Young disagrees, and with "Translation as Muse", she uses the work of the celebrated Roman poet Catullus...

"All art and the love of art", Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal "Musings on Mortality", "allow us to negate our nothingness". As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immer...

When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understa...

To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways – guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed artic...

Poetry is often viewed as culturally homogeneous – "stubbornly national", in T. S. Eliot's phrase, or "the most provincial of the arts", according to W. H. Auden. But in "A Transnational Poetics", Jahan Ramazani uncovers the ocean-straddling energies...

Shakespeare's plays abound with kings and leaders who crave a public stage and seize every opportunity to make their lives a performance: Antony, Cleopatra, Richard III, Othello, and many others. Such self-dramatizing characters appear in the work of...

Within Shakespeare's lifetime there was already some curiosity about what the writer of such brilliant poems, sonnets and plays looked like. Yet like so much else about him, Shakespeare's appearance is mysterious. Why is it so difficult to find imag...

In "Literary Spinoffs", Birgit Spengler explores the literary strategies, theoretical dimensions, and cultural implications of contemporary rewritings of nineteenth-century American literary classics. By tapping into powerful, ingrained literary and...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...