Word & Song by Anthony Esolen

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Poem of the Week

Check here or in your inbox every Wednesday for the Poem of the Week, usually a short poem, often one you might get by heart in a couple of minutes, with a brief discussion of the poet’s art as we find it in sound and sense, image and symbol, dramatic moment, dramatic irony, surprise and resolution. Learn to be at home in the art that is common to all mankind!

Language is ..boundlessly inventive, fanciful, jesting, sometimes as sharp as a shaft of light, sometimes meditative, like an Indian-summer with the…
Anthony Esolen
10
From John Milton, Paradise Lost | How to describe the feeling of someone wholly innocent and blessed? You can’t describe it. Maybe you can catch a…
Anthony Esolen
6
The quality of mercy is not strained;/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that…
Anthony Esolen
3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is all about fantastic visions that move the artist’s mind and soul to creative action. But the thing about visions is…
Anthony Esolen
11
John Donne. We do not always know what we love. Sometimes it strikes us as quite a revelation. Maybe some of my readers will say, “Yes, I didn’t know…
Anthony Esolen
1
The scene is a small cottage, in a crisp winter night, and the poet Coleridge is awake beside the low fire, and his sleeping infant son. He looks to…
Anthony Esolen
4
Imagine that you are a passionate young man of high ideals, the young John Keats, reading all the fine poetry he can find — Chaucer, Spenser…
Anthony Esolen
4
One of the marks of great art is that you can never come to an end of appreciating it. And perhaps the greatest works of art are those that themselves…
Anthony Esolen
21
Tennyson, from "In Memoriam," 1850
Anthony Esolen
5
T. S. Eliot, 1927
Anthony Esolen
11
John Betjeman
Anthony Esolen
2
Robert Louis Stevenson, 1888
Anthony Esolen
2
G. K. Chesterton (1899)
Anthony Esolen
Robert Frost (1928)
Anthony Esolen
2
George Herbert
Anthony Esolen
2
William Butler Yeats, 1891
Anthony Esolen
4
John McCrae, 1915
Anthony Esolen
4
Richard Wilbur
Anthony Esolen
5
George Herbert, 1639
Anthony Esolen
2
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Back when there weren’t any helpful drugs to clear away the obsessions of a troubled mind, a mountain of a man named Samuel Johnson kept them at bay…
Anthony Esolen
2
Language is ..boundlessly inventive, fanciful, jesting, sometimes as sharp as a shaft of light, sometimes meditative, like an Indian-summer with the…
Anthony Esolen
10
From John Milton, Paradise Lost | How to describe the feeling of someone wholly innocent and blessed? You can’t describe it. Maybe you can catch a…
Anthony Esolen
6
The quality of mercy is not strained;/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that…
Anthony Esolen
3
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The poem is all about fantastic visions that move the artist’s mind and soul to creative action. But the thing about visions is…
Anthony Esolen
11
John Donne. We do not always know what we love. Sometimes it strikes us as quite a revelation. Maybe some of my readers will say, “Yes, I didn’t know…
Anthony Esolen
1
The scene is a small cottage, in a crisp winter night, and the poet Coleridge is awake beside the low fire, and his sleeping infant son. He looks to…
Anthony Esolen
4
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