Wuthering
Expectations

What I do not want to do is write about why no one reads Walter Scott anymore, how Scott dropped from World’s Greatest Novelist to whatever ...

Yes we are!  We are in Walter Scott’s Waverley; or ‘tis Sixty Years Since (1814), the novel that launched a craze for historical fiction th...

Now I am going to look at the highlights of the Winter 2015 issue of The Hudson Review , my favorite literary journal. For a long time, T...

Clarence King, Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada (1872).  What we have here is a series of informal, amusing and instructive articles wri...

Some readers may remember – why they would, I do not know, but we live in an age of miracles – that a few months ago I jotted down some note...

I have read two translations of Giacomo Leopardi’s Canti .  Besides the poems they are both packed with scraps of Leopardi’s prose.  Leopard...

In the two poems following “Night Song of a Wandering Asian Shepherd,” Giacomo Leopardi describes the remedy for boredom.  A violent storm h...

Giacomo Leopardi is among literature’s greatest pessimists.  I will enjoy his pessimism in the form of the “Night Song of a Wandering Shephe...

A poem of Giacomo Leopardi made a surprising appearance in Daniel Deronda (1876).  I mean I was surprised.  The beautiful Jewish singer Mira...

I have to write up Coventry Patmore now or I will forget what I meant to say.  He will be hard to remember. Patmore is a dying poet.  Chec...

In 1806, Ugo Foscolo was in exile in London, his dream of Italian unity enacted not by Italians but by the conquests of Napoleon.  The write...

Foscolo’s great innovation was to politicize Goethe’s novel, to use the structure of The Sorrows of Young Werther to write a novel about a ...

What seemed logical was to move from Dino Campana back a century to Giacomo Leopardi, the poet who was so good he ruined Italian poetry for ...

I think Charles Wright’s translation of Campana is better than the older I. L. Salomon translation.  If there is still such a thing as a gre...

from The Violent Sounds of Night O poetry poetry poetry Rise rise rise up From the electric fever of the pavement at night.  (tr. I. L. ...

The Civil War episodes of Specimen Days , Whitman’s memorials to soldiers he tended, soldiers who suffered and died, are the best part of th...

The autobiographical side of the 1891 Leaves of Grass would have been clear enough on its own, I hope, but I also read Walt Whitman’s fragm...

The words of my book nothing, the drift of it every thing, A book separate, not link’d with the rest nor felt by the intellect, But you ye...

Now when Whitman is not speaking bad prose he sings, and when he sings at all he sings well.  (Swinburne Letters , Vol. 3, Feb. 20 1875 to E...

Aside from hundreds of pages of letters, Swinburne was always writing.  As usual, I have my Yale University Press Major Poems and Selected P...