POETRY MONDAY: Edna St. Vincent Millay
By Categories: Poetry

POETRY MONDAY : April 5, 2010

A Tribute to Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

 Although homage to this great poet would seem fitting at any time, it seems especially fitting for this column to offer it during National Poetry Month. I’m delighted, for strongly personal reasons, to have this opportunity. I remember how I felt as a teenager, sitting in my high-school English classroom and opening a literature anthology to her poem, “Renascence,” the way it spread thrillingly across the page, lifting me up and out of it.

Other women have reported a similar experience with that poem, which catapulted Millay into fame when she was only nineteen years old.  She became wildly popular, in a way that few poets are today, went on to publish many poetry collections, plays, and short-stories, and in 1923 was the first woman awarded the Pulitzer Prize.  Dismissed by some critics because of the feminist tone of her work, by others because of what they considered her anti-modernism and sentimentality, and later for her political activism, Millay began to be re-assessed and now is firmly established as a member of the canon.  In most anthologies of American poetry, her name is back in the index, with multiple pages listed.  She is fully recognized now for her technical virtuosity and dazzling range and is regarded as one of the most important American poets.  Continue reading POETRY MONDAY: Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism
By Categories: Books

Click Here to Read: Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism, Part 1 on the Cultural Studies and Literature blog.

Click Here to Read: Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism, Part 2 on the Cultural Studies and Literature blog.

Click Here to Read:  Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Lacanian Psychoanalytical Criticism, Part 3 on the Cultural Studies and Literature blog.

Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by Zvi Lothane
By Categories: Letters To Editors

Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by Zvi Lothane:

Eric Ormsby praises Jonathan Philips, the author of “Holy Warriors A Modern History of the Crusades,” for the “cool, almost documentary power [of] his narrative,” which inspires Ormsby to romanticize the Crusaders: “In fact, their faith was as pure as their savagery.” But were they so pure? Ormsby makes no reference to Phillips’ perfunctory descriptions of “pogroms” and massacres during the first Crusade, while Phillips studiously avoids mentioning “anti-Semitism or the role played by Church-sponsored hatred of the Jews in fueling the fervor of the Crusades. As noted by Paul Johnson in “A History of the Jews,” “the anti-Semitic ideology and folklore which helped to detonate the first crusader riots proved to be simply the plinth on which a vast superstructure of hostile rumour was built” (p. 208). Similarly, Count Heinrich Coudenhove-Kalergi, in his 1901 “Anti-Semitism throughout the Ages” (published in English in 1953 but cited by Sigmund Freud in his 1938 “Comment on anti-Semitism,” after he fled from Nazi Austria to London), noted the following: “with the Crusades began a time of the most terrible persecution of the Jews. Hosts of Crusaders, many of the the scum of French, English, Lothringian and Flemish countries, started, as Graetz says, their work of murdering and plundering with the Jews for want of Mohammedans. Continue reading Unpublished Letter to the Editor of the New York Times Book Review by Zvi Lothane