As the medieval poet Dante Alighieri ascends the mountain of purgatory, in the second canticle of his great poem, The Divine Comedy, he arrives as the terrace of the envious. There, those who took pleasure […]
I recently paid tribute to the poet Claude McKay, a singular figure in American literature. He was the first great poet of the Harlem Renaissance who inspired a generation. After a late-life conversion, in 1944, […]
I would like to recall a scene of almost two decades past. I was in my first year of doctoral work and was studying, at home on a bright Sunday afternoon. I found myself reflecting […]
Paul Mariani is in the most admirable sense a confessional poet. For more than fifty years, he taught modern poetry at various colleges, including the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and then, Boston College. He authored […]
Editor’s note: The following essay is a summary of an address given at Martin Saints Classical High School, in May 2019. ——– Modern education as we have known it for a century now tries to […]
The Christian Joy of Coming Together In the last months before his conversion, Saint Augustine heard the story of Gaius Victorinus, the pagan neo-Platonist philosopher who was himself converted to Christianity in his old age. […]
The most splendid acts of courage are rarely those where one dares something new. It can be all too easy to leave the past behind. They come, more often than not, as instances where one […]
That such poetry, as found in recent collections by Ryan Wilson and Mark Amorose, is being published now should tell us that literary culture is far better […]
A New England poet of nature, indeed, but something must also be said for Wilbur’s Catholic vision of the poet. […]
My maturation as a professor came when I learned to love ideas more by way of coming to love them through—in pilgrimage with, in communion […]
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