“In what ancient text does that passage appear?” Answer: It appears nowhere.

Name: Kornei Chukovsky. Dates: 1882 to 1969. Number of supremo-supremo classic children’s books to his credit: ten or twelve.

William Collins—“Poor Collins” to his contemporaries. 1721–1759: dead, completely incapacitated and insane, at thirty-seven.

On Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein

Nellie Oleson made ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ I don’t just mean she was an essential part of the show’s success. I mean Nellie wrote the original books and most of the scripts for the TV program. She directed most of the episodes, and, for the most part, she was the audience. 

Anthony Madrid does a deep dive into “The Zahir.”

Her first novel first novel came out in 1778, when she was twenty-five, and made her famous.

And you've never heard of it...

There was no stone, there was no corpse. It was like things now: there was a poet and there was a piece of paper. Unlike now, people understood meter.

A handy guide to why and how to read the thousand-page eleventh-century Japanese proto-novel.

Any Italian literary person would know the name “Sannazaro” in the same way people in my village would know the name “Sir Philip Sidney.”

My first piece was written at an early stage of the Waterman Renaissance. It’s been three weeks; much has happened.

Edward Lear’s limericks are called “nonsense,” but they’re not really that. They make sense; they’re just perverse. But here are some limericks that truly *are* nonsense.

There are certain abuses, rare enough in poetry, that are commonplace in works of fiction.

James Thomson (1700–1748) is my private property. I keep him in my pocket and take him out and look at him sometimes. He always looks good.

Anthony Madrid uncovers the source text of a small poem by Stevie Smith

Were you told, as a child, that fables are stupid? Today I think the opposite, straight down the line. Lessons are good; talking animals, hell yes. And anything that smacks of the Middle Ages is probably my only reason for getting up in the morning.

The grasshopper just made a mistake, y’all. It’s not like it’s an unalterable fact that he needs to be punished. Indeed, the moral could be: People who have evaded a calamity inevitably enjoy tormenting those who must bear the calamity’s brunt.

It is a blessing for a poet to have a Great Poet to fight with, forever. I don’t mean a Great Poet one merely despises. That’s nothing. It has to be someone you partly love, partly revere, but who lets you down over and over and over and makes you want to scream.

All of us have been thinking about this kind of thing for years, here at the Department of Ordinary Magic. We are very, very interested in supernatural phenomena that are entirely natural and that everyone ignores.

Guy Davenport did a translation of a famous poem by Mao Zedong; the form of this translation is almost unique in American letters.

  I don’t know that much about what babies actually say. I don’t have any. The ones I’ve seen in people’s apartments didn’t say anything. In one of my poems, I call babies “the crying people.” Heard plenty of that. The ones who sa…

All right, let’s do this as a speed round. Quick in, quick out. No diddling. Fact: there were, between 1550 and 1750, exactly three supremo-supremo English versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. They are as follows: Arthur Golding, The…

  If you were in the land of the living in ’93, you’ll remember a song called “All That She Wants,” by the Swedish band Ace of Base. I don’t know anybody who resisted that song. I, who usually hate songs like that (porny-poppy, slick, comp…

  Let’s make sure we’re all understanding each other. I’m not talking about novels and plays and poems. And I’m definitely not talking about great novels and plays and poems. It’s pointless to tell people to write stuff like that. Even t…

  We take the phrase “once upon a time” for granted, but if you think about it, it’s quite oddball English. Upon a time—? That’s just a strange construction. It would be pleasant to know its history: When, more or less, does it get up on…

  A few words about an underappreciated piece of reading technology. Talking about underlining in books. Nobody shows you how to do this, and it’s a pity. You find out quick that if you do it wrong, you ruin the book. If you do it right, …

  I suppose there are mathematicians out there “working on prime numbers.” I don’t know if there are. There probably are. They’re putting on coffee at 11 o’clock at night. They’re getting upset at each other on email, cussing. Or…

  I don’t know the backstory on this one. All I have is the assignment below, forwarded to me by my editor:     What is he even talking about. Actually, I can explain that. The part I can’t explain is how Auden can possibly have t…

  Everybody who cares anything for old poetry in English knows how it feels—knows how awful it feels—when a poem is rhyming away and then suddenly the rhyme goes off the rails for a second because English pronunciation has changed since th…

  A recap for those who missed part 1 (which is available here): Second century A.D., a strange and gigantically influential Latin text was written and passed around: Apuleius’s The Golden Ass. It’s a kind of first-person picaresque rom…

  1. Just to give you the essentials: Probably around 180 A.D. (which is to say probably during the reign of the emperor Marcus Aurelius), a novel was written in Latin. It really is a novel. Trot out any definition of novel: it’s that. Al…

  In Karl Shapiro’s best book, The Bourgeois Poet (1964), there’s an excellent poem to Randall Jarrell. The last line of that poem goes, “I rush to read you, whatever you print.” That’s how I feel about Megan Levad. That’s how I feel…

One of the poems in “Struwwelpeter”—so famous that Mark Twain once translated it—tells of a girl who lights herself on fire as her cats watch in horror.

  It appears a great deal is already known about the Grinch. He was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1904, did some graduate work at Oxford, left school to establish his Zarathustra’s eyrie on Mount Crumpit in Canada—and was fifty-th…

1. Our teacher (young, malevolent, witty) was holding forth about the “curlicues and inefficiency” of Derek Walcott’s poetic style. Our teacher said, “It’s like he wants to go to the kitchen to get a banana. So, he dresses up like Henry Ja…

  Regarding “Oh! Susanna,” there is little point in discussing the verses nobody knows. Let us confine ourselves to the verses everybody knows: Well, I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee I’m gwine to Louisiana · my true love fo…

The piece below was originally published on February 8, 2014, on Anthony Opal’s old website, the Weekly (since kaput). In reprinting it, we have only changed the very end of the “Afterword,” so that now you can simply click on a hyperlink to a…

  In my village, we have an idiom. “When’s last time you looked in on [X]—?” “X” is always some acknowledged literary classic everybody reads early in life and then forgets. For example, More’s Utopia. I did read it, but I might a…

  I don’t remember what I was talking about, that day in class, but somehow I found myself explaining about the Shijing. The Shijing, I said, is the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry. The poems date back to the Zhou dynasty, which fell ap…

  Joyce was good. He was a good writer. He makes me grumpy a lot, especially Ulysses, but he was good. There are at least twenty irresistible qualities to Ulysses. At or near the top of the stack, at least for me, is the way he traffics in what I …

Remember: H.D. was more of a priestess than anything else. She was more priestess than lover, more priestess than thinker, more priestess than woman.

I actually have two magazines. They don’t exist. Each one is better and more interesting than the other. I am the sole editor, have been from the beginning.

Children, we’re told, delight in nonsense. They do not wish to be taught anything. They love making a big mess. The problem is: children are also prigs.

It’s Leopardi’s birthday tomorrow. Happy 219, Giacomo. In remembrance, I think we’d all better have a look at the following short poem by James Wright.

You know how a wine expert will take a sip and a great swarm of facts will flood into the expert’s mind? Feelings are like that, too, if you have the training.

In which Anthony Madrid files strongly worded letters about T.S. Eliot, lazy lyricists, and Sanskrit translators who never tell you how to pronounce anything.

In 2013 I wrote more than three hundred limericks. They were a form of self-medication. Some days I made four or five versions of the same limerick…

The poems are so pregnant with meaning, one never feels one has done them justice simply by reading them.

“There’s no way to differentiate brain power beyond Good, Normal, and Not So Good. Anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaking cocksureness for intelligence.”

The right thing to do is to point to poetry with which people are already more or less familiar, or at least something from their tradition, and say: “Rumi is like ‘that’.”

One of the poems in “Struwwelpeter”—so famous that Mark Twain once translated it—tells of a girl who lights herself on fire as her cats watch in horror.

On the similarity between the beginnings of Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” and Philip Levine’s “They Feed They Lion.”

Anthony Madrid dips into “Edward Lear and the Play of Poetry,” in which academics scrutinize Lear’s nonsense anew.

The Italian writer’s translation work left him with a strange grasp of slang: he was fond of “toodle-oo,” “hunky dory,” “old chap,” “doggone,” “corking”…

I go around telling people that 99 percent of songs rhyme. Is that true? It might not be. Maybe songs all seem like they rhyme, but when you actually check…?

On the “Mrs Thrale” bit in Frank O’Hara’s “Meditations in an Emergency.”  Frank O’Hara composed the piece that he later called “Meditations in an Emergency” on or around June 25, 1954—anyhow, that is the date on the manuscript. At that time,…

 Jonathan Swift is 349 years old today. Which is to say he’s beginning his 350th year. What was he anyway? Or never mind what he was; what did he think he was? Did he think he was mainly the author of Gulliver’s Travels—? Did he think he was a jour…

In March 2016, our correspondent Anthony Madrid began composing a set of quasi-kōans (on the theme “What is poetry for?”) for the Chicago arts and commentary magazine The Point. What follows is the second of two sets written for the Daily. (The first…

Before we begin, I need you to search your heart and evaluate soberly whether you have ever had the experience of sincerely enjoying metrical effects in poetry. If you find in your bosom any doubts regarding this matter, I'm going to ask you to …

Hunting the sound stack in the rondels of D’Orléans.In the March 1915 issue of Poetry magazine (page 254), the following poem appeared for the first time in print: IMAGE FROM D’ORLEANSYoung men riding in the street
In the bright new season
Spur witho…

If “porn poetry” is defined as poetry that’s supposed to turn people on, then we have no tradition of porn poetry in English. What we have instead is a bunch of what might be called “exhilarating nastiness”: poetry that’s basically a rev…

You really can’t tell what a song is going to look like until you type it, and that fact itself is interesting to me. When you listen to a song, for instance, you don’t know whether its “stanzas” are in quatrains or tercets or what. The stanz…

What is poetry for? Note: Earlier this year, Anthony Madrid began composing quasi-koans on the theme “What is poetry for?” a first collection of which was published in the summer issue of The Point. This post includes the first of two sets of additio…

Ben Jonson bares all.Pretty soon it will have been four hundred years since Ben Jonson (1572–1637) walked from London to Edinburgh. I don’t know the whole story. I know he stayed at some length with William Drummond of Hawthornden, a few miles s…

In my village it’s a famous epigram, but I wonder how many of you are familiar with it. Here it is, complete and unexpurgated, in Anna Akhmatova’s original Russian, from 1958:Могла ли Биче словно Дант творить, 
Или Лаура жар любви восславить? 
Я н…