Harriet: News & Community

Editor's Note: This is the third installment in a three-part essay. To read the first two installments visit these links: Part I and Part II. The ice caps are melting: criticism has failed....

Part of the appeal of poetry as criticism, which I discussed in my last post, is the idea of a poem that can explain itself, with no intervention needed from...

Then, again, one day, the one who was once young will learn that somewhere at the other end of this very earth the older one has died. At first she...

For any writer, the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge brings moments of painful recognition at every turn. Richard Holmes’s magisterial biography of Coleridge is replete with examples of the Romantic...

In Critical Revolutionaries: Five Critics Who Changed the Way We Read, critic Terry Eagleton declares: “A critique must establish a certain distance from its object in order to appraise it.”...

Asking how my criticism relates to my poetry is like asking how my obsessions relate to my compulsions. It’s a question I’m much too glad to answer. I like Jhumpa...

I was a poet long before I even knew what a critic was. Children may be taught, as I was, to read poems and to write their own, but nobody...

When I set out to write about my mother’s azaleas—the baroque of their annual fuschias, the decadence of their overwrought efflorescence—the azaleas remained unsplendid and sullen. The azaleas refused—or did...