Oct 07 2025
What does sunlight smell like? How does a bat experience the night? Why can a familiar scent suddenly return us to a moment decades in the past? What does love do to the brain, and what does the human mind reveal about our place in the natural world? Diane Ackerman has spent much of her …
Oct 06 2025
Poetry can be intensely private and still speak to the world beyond the poet. In the work of Turkish poet Ayten Mutlu, longing, memory, love, war, womanhood, resistance, and the natural world frequently occupy the same imaginative space. Her poems can move from a deeply personal image to a much larger consideration of violence or …
Oct 05 2025
Born on October 5, 1900, Bing Xin lived through nearly the entire twentieth century, witnessing revolutions, wars, dramatic social change, political upheaval, and the transformation of modern Chinese literature. Through it all, she continued writing. Poet, essayist, fiction writer, translator, teacher, and one of the foundational figures of modern Chinese children’s literature, Bing Xin created …
Oct 04 2025
Few poets have become as closely associated with a particular age as Cahit Sıtkı Tarancı. His celebrated poem Otuz Beş Yaş, or Age Thirty-Five, turned the midpoint of life into an unforgettable meditation on time, aging, and mortality. Yet Tarancı’s poetry is not simply preoccupied with death. Again and again, the awareness that life will …
Oct 02 2025
Wallace Stevens spent his working life in a world of insurance policies, offices, legal documents and corporate decisions. Yet inside that orderly professional existence, he created some of the strangest, most imaginative and intellectually adventurous poetry of twentieth-century America. Born on October 2, 1879, Stevens did not follow the familiar story of the young poet …
Sep 30 2025
W. S. Merwin spent much of his life writing about things that disappear: languages, forests, animals, memories, places, people, and moments that vanish almost as soon as we become aware of them. Yet his poetry rarely treats disappearance as a reason to stop looking. If anything, the knowledge that something may be lost makes attention …
Sep 27 2025
Born on September 27, 1729, Michael Denis occupied an unusual place in eighteenth-century European culture. He was a poet, Jesuit priest, teacher, translator, librarian, bibliographer, and student of the natural world, moving easily between literature and scholarship during an era when those fields were not yet separated as sharply as they often are today. Denis …
Sep 26 2025
Born on September 26, 1888, T. S. Eliot became one of the defining voices of twentieth-century literature, a poet whose work captured the anxiety, fragmentation, loneliness, spiritual uncertainty, and rapidly changing rhythms of the modern world. His poems could be difficult, allusive, unsettling, and sometimes deliberately disorienting, but they altered the possibilities of poetry so …
Sep 25 2025
Born on September 25, 1930, Shel Silverstein became one of those rare writers whose books children often discover before they have any idea that poetry is supposed to be serious. His pages are filled with impossible creatures, ridiculous situations, rebellious children, strange inventions, disappearing body parts, enormous appetites, terrible excuses, unexpected sadness, and drawings that …
Sep 24 2025
Born on September 24, 1944, Eavan Boland spent much of her literary life asking who gets remembered in poetry and who disappears from the record. Irish poetry had long drawn upon heroic history, national struggle, mythology, landscape, and public events, but Boland repeatedly turned toward experiences that had often been treated as too ordinary or …
