IT IS usually dangerous for anyone whose gift is one art to attempt to follow another. The pitfalls of following poetry when your gift is prose are obvious enough to ...

Of Joan Didion’s clipped style in A Book of Common Prayer, Martin Amis once remarked: “The most poetic thing about Miss Didion’s prose in this novel is that it doesn’t go all the way across the page.” ...

Mario Cuomo once famously remarked, "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." This metaphor, highlighting the shift from rhetoric to reality, applies to various contexts. A good example is the ...

When Brad Leithauser, now a professor in the Writing Seminars, came across an article about Iceland in 1984—years before the country's emergence in the late 1990s as a hip tourist spot—he knew he had ...

Book One was my very first work. I was a fiction writer and had graduated some years ago with an MFA in fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I did not yet see myself as a poet. After attempts at ...

The critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), known best in his lifetime for his writing on Shakespeare, was a jack of all trades and a master of none too few, trying his deft hand at painting, philosophy, ...