The Life, the Universe, and Everything
Sergei Yesenin (4 Oct. 1895 – 27 Dec. 1925)
* * *
I will not deceive myself, admitting
I have worries in my heart, so dreary.
Why am I reputed as a cheating
Crook and trouble-maker, really?
I am not a villain nor a thief in hiding,
And I never shot imprisoned convicts.
I am just a thoughtless idler, smiling
Friendly and avoiding conflicts.
I [...]
That poetry matters to the people who write it has been shown unmistakably by the ordeal of Soviet poet Irina Ratushinskaya, now living in the West. Sentenced to prison for three and a half years, she was given paper and pencil only twice a month to write letters to her husband and her parents and [...]
Sergei Yesenin (4 Oct. 1895 – 27 Dec. 1925)
* * *
No regret I feel, no pain, no sorrow,
Blossom blows away, a song is sung.
Overcome by autumn gold, tomorrow
I myself shall be no longer young.
You’ll not throb, heart, as before, but tremble,
Feeling chills that you have not yet known.
In bare feet you shall no more be [...]
“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.”
— James Baldwin
by Donald Hall (1928 – )
What’s Good, What’s Bad
The claims I make for fiction are large: that it alerts and enlarges our minds, our connections with each other past and present, our understanding of our feelings. These claims apply to excellent literature only. This suggests that some fiction is better than other fiction, and that [...]
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