Sublime

Years ago, I wrote an article called “Poetry, Pleasure, and the Hedonist Reader” in which I enumerated five or six of the principle pleasures of poetry. One of the final pleasures, for instance, is the pleasure of meaning—the moment when a poem’s emotional effect begins to crystallize into significance you can articulate. But the very final pleasur

When J. F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of the Stowe School in Vermont, was asked in the 1920s about the purpose of his institution, he said it was to turn out young men who were “acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.”

twenty pages in length during the entire year.

As with any great teacher, one can find the strongest evidence of Perry’s legacy in the success of his students: they became legislators, scholars, and businessmen. (CSB was coed, but Perry focused his efforts almost entirely on his male students; while he was ahead of his time in his thinking on disability, his views on gender were, unfortunately,

Whitman had rewritten, expanded, cut, and reimagined his poems across his life. He’d created not one beautiful book but different attempts at excellence and beauty as he aged and loved and reconsidered everything.