Interview with Mary Stone Assistant Editor of Blue Island Review Mary Stone’s poetry and prose has appeared or is forthcoming in A Clean Well-Lighted Place, Notes Magazine, Mochila, Coal City Review, Amoskeag, Lingerpost, FutureCycle Poetry, Flint Hills Review, North Central Review, Spring Formal, Canvas and other fine journals. In 2011 she received the Langston Hughes…
Interview with Missouri Review Editor Michael Nye
Interview with Missouri Review Editor Michael Nye Michael Nye is the former managing editor of River Styx, and has taught creative writing at the University of Missouri, Lindenwood University, and Washington University in St. Louis. His short stories have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, New South, Quiddity, Red Cedar Review, Sou’wester, and South Dakota Review,…
Interview with Tin House Editor Rob Spillman
Interview with Rob Spillman We were excited and honored that Rob Spillman would take part in our interview series. Mr. Spillman is editor and co-founder of Tin House. The publication is without question one of the best literary magazines in the country. He spoke to us by email. We enjoyed this interview very much. EWR:…
An English Critic on Mark Twain
An English Critic on Mark Twain An English Critic on Mark Twain: Perhaps the most successful flights of humor of Mark Twain have been descriptions of the persons who did not appreciate his humor at all. We have become familiar with the Californians who were thrilled with terror by his burlesque of a newspaper reporter’s way…
The Function of the Poet by James Russell Lowell
The Function of the Poet by James Russell Lowell This was the concluding lecture in the course which Lowell read before the Lowell Institute in the winter of 1855. Doubtless Lowell never printed it because, as his genius matured, he felt that its assertions were too absolute, and that its style bore too many marks…
On Siegfried Sassoon by Robert Nichols
On Siegfried Sassoon by Robert Nichols Sassoon the Man: In appearance he is tall, big-boned, loosely built. He is clean-shaven, pale or with a flush; has a heavy jaw, wide mouth with the upper lip slightly protruding and the curve of it very pronounced like that of a shrivelled leaf (as I have noticed is common…
Difficulty of Analysis The Human Mind by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Difficulty of Analysis The Human Mind by Percy Bysshe Shelley If it were possible that a person should give a faithful history of his being, from the earliest epochs of his recollection, a picture would be presented such as the world has never contemplated before. A mirror would be held up to all men in…
On The Physiology of Laughter by Herbert Spencer
On The Physiology of Laughter by Herbert Spencer Why do we smile when a child puts on a man’s hat? or what induces us to laugh on reading that the corpulent Gibbon was unable to rise from his knees after making a tender declaration? The usual reply to such questions is, that laughter results from…
William Blake and the Imagination by W. B. Yeats
William Blake and the Imagination by W. B. Yeats There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them, and hid them from the understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke…
A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson
A College Magazine by Robert Louis Stevenson I All through my boyhood and youth, I was known and pointed out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one…
To a Young Journalist by Andrew Lang
Dear Smith,— You inform me that you desire to be a journalist, and you are kind enough to ask my advice. Well, be a journalist, by all means, in any honest and honourable branch of the profession. But do not be an eavesdropper and a spy. You may fly into a passion when you receive…
Art and the Handicraftsman by Oscar Wilde
Art and the Handicraftsman by Oscar Wilde PEOPLE often talk as if there was an opposition between what is beautiful and what is useful. There is no opposition to beauty except ugliness: all things are either beautiful or ugly, and utility will be always on the side of the beautiful thing, because beautiful decoration is…
What is Popular Poetry? by W. B. Yeats
W.B. Yeats challenges literary conventions in ‘What is Popular Poetry?’, exploring authentic Irish verse and how true poetry transcends cultural divisions
About War Poetry by George Herbert Clarke (1917)
About War Poetry by George Herbert Clarke (1917) Because man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace, and peace may so decay as inevitably to…
Of Love by Francis Bacon
THE stage is more beholding to love, than the life of man. For as to the stage, love is ever matter of comedies, and now and then of tragedies; but in life it doth much mischief; sometimes like a siren, sometimes like a fury. You may observe, that amongst all the great and worthy persons…