In 1965, two years after Sylvia Plath’s death, Ted Hughes published Ariel. This was her second collection of poetry—her first was The Colossus (1960)—but it’s the collection that elevated her reputation and established her as a literary genius. In organizing Ariel for publication, Hughes dropped twelve poems that Plath intended to include, and he replaced them with twelve...
Though he lived only forty years, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most prolific writers of his times. The most often reported number of short stories is sixty-nine, the number provided by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. I haven’t been able to find the number of poems he wrote, but his...
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary/Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—so reads, arguably, the most famous couplet in American poetry. It’s surely is the most famous quotation in Edgar Allan Poe’s oeuvre. One doesn’t have to be a literary scholar to recognize it and know...
At my first creative writing class, the grad student who taught it asked how many of us write fiction. All hands went up. How many of you consider yourself fiction writers? A few hands dropped, but most stayed up. How many write poetry? Most of us kept their hands up. How many of you...
