The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “poetry”

What We Keep in Loss: William Blake’s Stirring Letter to a Bereaved Father
What We Keep in Loss: William Blake’s Stirring Letter to a Bereaved Father

“Our deceased friends are more really with us than when they were apparent to our mortal part.”

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Myths, Facts, and Poetic Truth: Amy Lowell on Legends as a Lens on Our Elemental Limitations and Powers
Myths, Facts, and Poetic Truth: Amy Lowell on Legends as a Lens on Our Elemental Limitations and Powers

“Legends… are bits of fact, or guesses at fact, pressed into the form of a story and flung out into the world as markers of how much ground has been travelled.”

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Twenty Reasons for Being
Twenty Reasons for Being

A pastiche poem of tribute to the past and resolve for the possible.

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Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost
Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”

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Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity
Poet Mark Doty on Connection and Creativity

“We are all co-extensive, and our work is to move toward union… We must know our fellows in order for everything to move forward; it is our spiritual imperative to connect, or else the destiny of the world cannot be completed.”

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The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love
The Third Thing: Poet Donald Hall on the Secret to Lasting Love

“Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site of joint rapture or contentment.”

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The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled
The Only Valiant Way to Complain Is to Create: William Blake and the Stubborn Courage of the Unexampled

“The Eye altering alters all.”

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The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe

“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?”

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Octopus Blues and the Poetry of the Possible
Octopus Blues and the Poetry of the Possible

An ode to unbreaking our hearts by widening our lenses on reality.

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Trees at Night: Rebecca Solnit Reads and Reflects on a Stunning Century-Old Poem by the Young Harlem Renaissance Poet Helene Johnson
Trees at Night: Rebecca Solnit Reads and Reflects on a Stunning Century-Old Poem by the Young Harlem Renaissance Poet Helene Johnson

An eighteen-year-old prodigy’s song of praise for the eternal consolation of trees.

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