A traditional theological question asks why God allows there to be evil in the world. I shall consider some untraditional answers. While for the religious this problem is a pressing one, the non-religious too can find it interesting, or at least a challenging intellectual exercise. The "problem of evil" is set up by the fact…
trans. Chinese Robin D.S. Yeates Born between 834 and 836, Wei Chuang lived through the bloody collapse of the T'ang dynasty, which had witnessed the first great flowering of the art of poetry in China. He lost almost all the verse he had composed in the first fifty years of his life when, on January…
trans. Greek Martin McKinsey 1. It is one of the talents of great stylists to make obsolete words cease from appearing obsolete through the way in which they introduce them in their writing. Obsolete words which under the pens of others would seem stilted or out of place, occur most naturally under theirs. This is…
trans. Greek Athan Anagnostopoulos 1930 January 12 "We remain at the same post awaiting orders." I was quietly walking in the street, when they hit me on the back and I found myself in an elevator. There, a priest, sitting on his cap, was combing his hair with a seashell. He turned, looked, and asked…
Saturday, late at night. I've returned from the outside. I know tomorrow's waking and the daily uphill climb. The streets were quiet; the mind light; the soul with all her windows open. Life's despair, sentiments condemned to end, man's wretchedness, the inevitable death – were circulating through the openings and didn't bother me. I am…
People ought to like poetry the way a child likes snow, and they would if the poets wrote it. Wallace Stevens Affection for poems is a personal thing, transcending time, fashion, and even friendship. We return less often to what we admire or approve of than to what we love, and there are surprisingly few…
trans. French Richard Wilbur The plot of Racine's last "secular" play is sufficiently well-known. Phaedra, the virtuous wife of King Theseus of Athens, is afflicted by Heaven with an illicit passion for her step-son Hippolytus, and the consequences are tragic for all concerned: the death of the falsely accused Hippolytus, the bereavement of his beloved…
I ‘The Strand of Dark Beginnings’ "But metaphor is never innocent. It orients research and fixes results," Jacques Derrida writes in Writing and Difference (17). And so for the poet who wishes to write a poetry of discovery rather than a mimicry or recitation of fixed forms of thinking, metaphor must subvert cultural and aesthetic…
I last edited an issue of Ploughshares (Vol. 1/4) nearly 12 years ago. It was a pleasure doing it once more and I would be glad to do it again in the future-say, in another 12 years. The emphasis in this issue is on younger / newer poets. In many cases, I chose to accept…
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