I dare to imagine the general public learning to write code. I do not mean that knowledge of programming should join the ranks of subjects that represent basic literacy: languages, history, philosophy, the fundamentals of science and mathematics. I mean it the other way...

English needs a word for the loneliness you feel when no one else hears what sounds to you like the loudest noise in the room. It happens when your personal receiver is set to a frequency no one else seems to be aware of;...

We donated my dad’s eyes. They were very pretty. What eyes aren’t? Somewhere, I suppose, they still are very pretty. The Eye Donation Bank sent a note thanking us for our gift, the eyes, creating an idea of a gruesome jewelry box. The Bank...

Fiction almost always gets Artificial Intelligence wrong. The AI narratives are generally Frankenstein (“It’s gone rogue!” e.g. Skynet) or Pinocchio (“I just want to be a real boy!” e.g. Commander Data), both of which are a little banal, and neither of which have much...

A few months ago I traveled to India for work. I went north and south, seeing auto rickshaws and UNESCO architecture. One of the best things I saw was a logo. The logo stands for the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad, Gujarat....

My first experience with Robert Lowell’s poetry was a failure in reading comprehension. Breezing through a stack of poems I’d been assigned for a college class, I came to his “Man and Wife” and gave it my cursory attention. Its setup is not hard...

We are, famously, a nation of escaped convicts, younger sons, persecuted minorities, and opportunists. This fame is local and racial: white America’s myth of itself. It does not, obviously, describe Native Americans and African Americans: though they are theoretically free to participate in mythic...

Of the many resources I’ve mined in researching James Wright: A Life in Poetry, the most vivid have been recordings of Wright’s readings over the course of two decades, when he was a vital public figure in the world of American poetry. A...

So Where Are We? So where were we? The fiery avalanche headed right at us—falling, flailing bodies in midair— the neighborhood under thick gray powder— on every screen. I don’t know where you are, I don’t know what I’m going to do, I heard a man say; the man who had spoken...

ENGLISH 206 Why would anyone even want to do it anymore? Fifty-two years ago I didn’t know what it was, And yet I knew I wanted to do it too, like the idea of a mind The self aspires to, the self a mind endeavors to become. I...

Rather than reflect on his poems or essays, which are still here for anyone to read or reread, I want to say a few words about our friendship, one whose nature, though central, is hard to capture, apparently uneventful as it was. Everything that...

In trying to sum up the experience of having spent the last ten years editing the poetry of Marianne Moore, most recently in the New Collected Poems, I think of a recent classroom interaction I had. Toward the end of a course on...

Two items from the poet John Ashbery’s private collections appear on the cover for The Songs We Know Best. One is a yellow card from the early 1940s that his father, Chester "Chet" Ashbery, designed to advertise goods sold by the Ashbery...

The circumstances of my own life have fueled my attraction to Leonardo Padura’s last two novels and led to my translation of them. When I first read The Man Who Loved Dogs—his sprawling novel about Trotsky’s years in exile, and the Soviet plot to...

It’s Emmanuel Carrère who stopped me from writing this article. Right at the moment when I’d planned to knuckle down and sort through the disparate ideas that had occurred to me during the four years I’d spent translating his works, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—which...

Shirley Hazzard, who died on December 12 at the age of 85, wrote two collections of short stories, four novels, and three works of nonfiction. FSG published her last two works: in 2000, a memoir about Graham Greene, Greene on Capri, and, in...

In 2001 I was living in Charlottesville, reading poetry at the University of Virginia, a young Canadian who had never been in the southern states before. In my second week I bought a beautiful used set of Shelby Foote’s Civil War volumes. Six weeks...

I take it as a compliment when people say my writing about music makes them interested in hearing the work I have described. The comment may not always be intended as a compliment. It may well be meant to say that the words on...

“A Reply to Filmer” The binding was brittle and faded, but Carol could still make out the words. We’d spent the last three years scouring the library for rare volumes, but we’d missed this one, the rarest. Our...

As an undergraduate I became fixated on my tutor, Ann Wordsworth, a woman of devastating command who held the other English Literature dons in contempt. Tutorials were conducted in a grubby shed in the college grounds where we chain-smoked Gitanes and quaffed red wine...