Janine Beichman is a translator and scholar of Japanese literature whose publications include biographies of the poets Masaoka Shiki and Yosano Akiko, and the original Noh play Drifting Fires. She received the 2019–2020 Japan–United States Friendship Commission Prize for the Translation of Japanese Literature for Beneath the Sleepless Tossing of the Planets (Kurodahan Press), her translations of the

Literary Imagination, https://doi:10.1093/litimag/imaa029

When you live in a placenothing beats hanging the nameplate yourself.

“My Eyes Have Seen What My Hand Did”: A Review of The Dolphin: Two Versions, 1972-1973 by LowellRobert, edited by HamiltonSaskia (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2019. 195 pages. ISBN 978-0-374-53827-9. $18)

Suddenly I was awake andautumn was by my bed.

Life, too, like a sentence, is lived unconsciously, and its “meaning” in retrospect is another thing.11

 In 1959, Geoffrey Hill’s first book of poetry was published, the same year that saw Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. Hill’s book is strongly influenced by both Lowell and one of Lowell’s poetic mentors, Allen Tate; its title, For the Unfallen, provides a counter to Lowell’s poem “For the Union Dead,” which itself responds to Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.”11 But while Lowell, in Life Studies, was

Letters of interest, 1870s, include: Edward Alfred Pollard concerning the completion of his book “The Lost Curse.” —(Library catalog error)11

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Birth-Mark” (1843) and “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844) have often been interpreted as a critique of science both inside and outside the literary scholarship. Men of science in these two short stories, Aylmer and Rappaccini, aspire to create a perfect form of humanity by attempting to transform their beloved ones into an impeccably beautiful woman with no blemishes, or into

Alex Andriesse is the translator of Chateaubriand's Memoirs from Beyond the Grave and Roberto Bazlen's Notes without a Text. He is at work on an edition of Elizabeth Hardwick's uncollected essays, forthcoming from NYRB Classics.

Villette, Charlotte Brontë’s final masterpiece of 1853, evinces the intersection between literature and medicine in mid-Victorian culture, in which the two disciplines became increasingly specialized and also discursively interdependent at the same time.11 The connection between the two distinct fields present in the novel is unequivocally illustrated by its narrative preoccupation with mental and

I am thinking of Frank O’Hara as I walk wearing my mask through the empty middleOf our village, how in his poems he seems always strolling down a street like this one, only better,Shopping—usually buying gifts. He’s on his way to the sort of party to which I’ll neverBe invited, where the radical painters and poets of Greenwich Village swill stiff martinis,Saying Thanks, Frank! when he passes out the

woke up suddenly late at night…huge chrysanthemums stirringin a corner of my room—tomorrow signs of decay will appearon this beauty of their full bloom andthey'll have to leave the beauty behind and set offon a long journey and with that ahead there's no waythose flowers can sleep, because they'reall getting ready

Good night.Evening has swooped in.Like the ocean tide.We are all little islandson the earth as it floats in the sky.Every daymorning noon and eveningvisit us from so far awayand then go off again afar.Like things whose shapes were visibleturn dark and disappear inside the seaeveryone slides into bedto sleep.Damp, sinking, we forget who we are.From the day of our birthwe practice how to sleep.Even so

Few modern poets have suffered more tumultuous critical fortunes than Edna St Vincent Millay. First praised, then condemned, for the “passionate” quality of her writing, Millay now plays a minor role in American literary history, even as her popularity among readers of poetry has remained strong. Over the past thirty years, several scholars have attempted to restore Millay’s place in the canon by reframing

We pay it, even when our backs are turned,hackling. As, when dreaming,

I would like very much to be a normal old man like the others, sitting on a park benchNot reading the New York Times I walked four blocks to buy from the convenience store,Just soaking up April sunlight and taking catnaps while I get ready to play mental checkersWith God. When I was a boy I wanted very much to be a normal boy—you thinkThat business in Pinocchio comes from nowhere?— but never made the

Every morning it is like this: I wake staring into the ravenous eyes of a blue-black catWho will eat me raw if I don’t feed him now, and the razorblades of the logos whip throughEvery cell of my being. Once again I become this self, mostly for the worse, while the angst of the dayCommences with a body count. Last time I wrote a letter to the gods, it came back marked Unknown,And I thought How appropriate

In the spring of 1800, François-René de Chateaubriand sailed from the cliffs of Dover to the headlands of Calais. He was thirty-one and had been living as a political refugee in England for more than seven years, at times in such extreme poverty he subsisted on nothing but hot water and two-penny rolls. As a nobleman and a veteran of the counterrevolutionary Army of Princes (in which he had briefly

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The Ear of the Earth In dappled light a glintof beaded web, a tentpitched on palpable airto dry and disappear. Under the breathing treesnerves arc across the grass.A tympanum responds.Go gently, monster. Nightshade From where I stand here on the shorethere is a path no one can walk.It spans the harbor, made by moonlight.Now I am ready to set out.It shimmers on the edge of sleep. Remembering Alejandra leaves

“I go out of this year a Poet,” Wilfred Owen wrote to his mother on December 31, 1917, eleven months before he was killed, “as which I did not enter it. I am held peer by the Georgians; I am a poet’s poet. I am started. The tugs have left me; I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon”. While we might warm to the excitement here, and want to agree with the self-estimation, we might

Over the earth’s dark corners swiftly goThe ravens at midday, their shrieking shrill.Their shadows sweep across a grazing doeAnd sometimes they’re seen glumly sitting still.

Weeks since you touched me, and not evenin bed, but visiting your home country, we had each other on the floor.Our reason, our daughter, curled on the mattress, pillow-buttressed, so asleepwe worried she was dead. Past worlds whir in my headwhen I drop her off at day care to make time for the money I earnto keep her alive – like the city I mastered finding a parking place by the river fastereven than

My mother held my hand. My father didn’t.A man with an Irish accent held up the world.It was bread and he said it was the world,it was bread and no one had risen it.What was custom, I believed was law.No one minded if a girl stayed quiet, but the waypeople stood together made me want to leave.The story about the friends who lost their favoriteperson got sad at the end. They didn’ttalk about the dead

He’s perched square on a residential block.The black winds camp about his face. He broods,Furious, where the final houses flockInto the countryside’s far solitudes.

My crib was leant against a bookcase, where—Dim Babel—novels, science, fabliaux,And Latin’s ashes with Greek’s dusty fareAll mingled. I stood tall as a folio.Two voices spoke to me. One, firm and sly,Said: “Earth’s a cake that’s full of sweet delight;I (And your pleasure then would never die!)Can give you a commensurate appetite.”The other: “Oh! In dreams come voyagingBeyond the possible, beyond the

I didn’t go to the wars of my youth (I had several chances). I don’t regret it, those who went regret it.Wars are forever acclaimed in the making, but rarely in hindsight, when parents weep and damaged men returnto a society bloodshed and suffering haven’t improved much. Instead, I spent my twenties chasing women(some of whom slowed down sufficiently that even I overtook them) and drinking wine, when

(prompted by George Eliot’s words, quoted here in italics, from her novella The Lifted Veil)IMr Letherall’s phrenological readingI was in a state of tremor, partly at the vague idea that I was the object ofreprobation, partly in the agitation of my first hatred—hatred of this big, spectacled man, who pulled my head about as if he wanted to buy and cheapen it. So big, the man in black, with such large

The old dog shivers, trying to stand, and I thinkof my father shivering in flannel pajamas undera bundle of blankets on Long Island in September,who was born before World War I and diedwith the American century one year almostto the day before the Towers came down and ashturned the tip of Manhattan into a vision of Pompeii.The dog shudders, falls, struggles to find its feet.Love and loss are so intertwined

Cuneiformed in the mineral darkpaling traces of a dead Amorite language (or,for that matter, Babareño, Thracian, Hunnic, Gey)schoolboys with detectors sweep for coins.

The following piece is excerpted from Max Jacob: A Life in Art and Letters. Jacob was born in 1876 to a non-observant Jewish family in Quimper, Brittany. After succeeding brilliantly at the lycée, he went to Paris for advanced studies at the École Coloniale and in law. He gravitated quickly, however, to a life in the arts. He met Picasso in 1901 and their intense friendship became the nucleus for the

A discussion of the inter-textual relations between three novels: R L Stevenson's The Ebb-Tide, H G Wells' The Island of Dr Moreau, and Joseph Conrad's Victory, in terms of their status as 'South-Sea' island imaginative works.

It always bothers me to hear a fishermansay “baitfish.” As if it were the meaningof the fish’s lives to be devoured.Are pigfish, pinfish, sand perch, scaled sardinesalert to every shadow, every unfamiliar swish,hair-triggered to escape?

i.m. Michael StairsThe musicians take their instruments away.The theater that they played in was old.The walls of the theater are red,and the stagelights gold.You said the scenery was overratedon the wild north coast of the country.From Scotland you could see us standingat different agesin the same dark rain.I thought there might be something in itso I texted you at night from the cityas the police

Ezra Pound’s reputation “enjoys a state of considerable volatility”11 notes Mark Byron in the introduction to The New Ezra Pound Studies (2019), making a supposed luxury of its unevenness: the recent Ezra Pound and the Career of Modern Criticism (2018) asks us to “misread him in new ways.”22 His legacy is unsettled and unsettling. Those who knew him found it no easier to fix their account. Lyndsey

T h e e f f e c t s o f p o l l u t i o n S t o r m w a t e r r u n o f f o c c u r s w h e n p r e c i p i t a t i o n f r o m r a i n o r s n o w m e l t f l o w s o v e r t h e g r o u n d . I m p e r v i o u s s u r f a c e s l i k e d r i v e w a y s , s i d e w a l k s , a n d s t r e e t s p r e v e n t s t o r m w a t e r f r o m n a t u r a l l y s o a k i n g i n t o t h e g r o u n d . S

In 1971, Philip Larkin made a rare excursion into academic writing, while editing his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. His subject was the most successful lyric anthology in literary history: The Golden Treasury, compiled by Francis Turner Palgrave and Alfred Tennyson. Published during his time at All Souls College, Larkin’s article described A. E. Housman’s no less than forty-one neat