Author: Paul Ramsey (Paul Ramsey)

Home Paul Ramsey
Post

Going Beyond Tink and Tank

Charles Edward Eaton, in New and Selected Poems, as elsewhere, is a remarkable poet, a fine metrist and stylist, and a close disciple of Wallace Stevens in artistic skill and finesse as well as in theory and topics. Many a poet who buys whole hog and pen Stevens’ often-prevalent view of poetics (and thus poetry)...

Post

The Deconstructive Lyric

“Poetry is certainly something more than good sense, but it must be good sense . . . just as a palace is more than a house, but it must be a house.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge Margaret Atwood writes in her poem “Mushrooms”: Here is the handful of shadow I have brought back to you, this...

Speaking True
Post

Speaking True

“Three million years The Spirit, ranging as it will, In sun, in darkness, lives in change. Changed and not changed. The spirit hears In drifting fern the morning air.” —Janet Lewis, “Fossil, 1975” What is it that poetry does and is? We can say that poetry is about why people do things, and about what...