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Gradually, with more life experience, I have gained perspective and poetic nerve.
Rainbow Lorikeet (Trichoglossus moluccanus).
Bernard Dupont, via Wikimedia Commons
For poet Robert Adamson, the natural world offered a form of deliverance.
A Muslim protester shouts at security personnel on the streets of Shaheen Bagh, a neighborhood in Delhi, in 2020.
Sajjad Hussain/AFP via Getty Images
Thanks to a strong oral Urdu literary tradition in South Asia, poems from the past linger in the popular imagination.
Lukas Coch/AAP
Writers have long rhapsodised about real estate – or the difficulty acquiring it – but contemporary authors are asking awkward questions about the inequities of our property obsession.
The Morning Comes (1793-1821), by William Blake.
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
A subtle and thoughtful show, full of shimmering connections that put Blake back in touch with European art figures and influences.
Spring in Central Park, New York. April 2023.
EPA-EFE/Sarah Yenesel
Haiku poems chart flowers appearing earlier and species retreating to the margins.
Nam Le.
Simon & Schuster
To ask whether 36 Ways to Write a Vietnamese Poem is a collection of poems or a single long poem is to step through the looking glass.
A perfectly imperfect tea bowl.
Zen Rial/Moment via Getty Images
‘Wabi’ and ‘sabi’ are Japanese words with long histories, but they are rarely used together in the way Western designers have come to use the term.
Taylor Swift performing at the Tokyo Dome, February 7, 2024.
Toru Hanai/AAP
There is nothing to lose and plenty to gain in teaching Swift’s Midnights and Shakespeare’s Sonnets together. There’s no dumbing-down, and no need for reductive assertions about who is “better”.
An image of a reclining Lord Vishnu with the alvar poets arrayed below him.
The Nadar Press Ltd., Sivakasi, ca. 1920s. From the personal print collection of Archana Venkatesan and Layne Little
In Hindu devotional poetry, love directed toward Vishnu can take many forms, including service, maternal adoration and the intense intimacy of lovers.
Sonnets still have a reputation for being about the unrequited love of a man for a woman.
AndreasPraefcke/Wikimedia Commons
These moving poems are a reminder that on Valentine’s Day, it’s OK to celebrate a broader definition of love.
The Instapoet Rupi Kaur on her book tour.
MediaPunch Inc/Alamy
Literary critics and scholars need to take poetry that originated on social media more seriously.
Menelaus holding the body of Patroclus – Diana Mantuana (1535-1587).
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Reading Wilson’s Iliad, one senses something of the chant of Homer’s verse, even through the written word.
Nayef Hammouri/Shutterstock
In her prose and her poetry, Sara M. Saleh renders unique the ways people resist, transcend, adapt, make the best of things, compromise, endure, and lose hope and faith.
Ellis Humphrey Evans, known by his bardic name Hedd Wyn, was killed on the first day of the battle of Passchendaele.
Chronicle/Alamy
Bard Hedd Wyn was killed in action in France in 1917.
Medicine is as much about the human experience as it is about biology.
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While medical school may teach students about how the body works, it often neglects the social, political and cultural factors that determine health and disease. The humanities can help.
Sorapop Udomsri/Shutterstock
I want to help people without prior knowledge of art history write about issues that affect them – through the prism of an artwork.
Jeremy Sutton Hibbert / Alamy
The great Irish poet left a legacy of astonishing poems that speak to new readers with their deep wisdom and quietly devastating imagery.
The late and beloved Leonard Cohen acknowledges fans at a Toronto performance in 2008.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Aaron Harris
Leonard Cohen, a man about whom surely no Hallmark festive movie will ever be made, dared the Divine to answer humanity’s sorrows.
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Pi O is known for his wit and irreverence. His anarchism, reflexive anti-Americanism and anti-capitalism are all part of the deal.