Eleanor Ross Taylor is a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award in poetry for her collection Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960–2008. From our entry:
Taylor’s poetry is most often compared to that of Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Bishop, and Marianne Moore. “[O]f course I loved Emily Dickinson and read a lot of Emily [...]

Click to continue →

I love it when the New York Times uses big words like crepuscular, as in the “strange crepuscular tradition” of some black-clad dude visiting Edgar Allan Poe’s graveside every year on his birthday—which was yesterday—bearing three red roses and a bottle of Cognac. The tradition goes back to 1949, apparently.
But the visitor—whose identity, or identities, [...]

Click to continue →

New images of Edgar Allan Poe have surfaced, the Associated Press reports in a rather excitable article that calls the writer “vigorous” and “dashing.”
The more robust Poe is captured in a small watercolor by A.C. Smith, one of just three surviving portraits of the author, which will be shown publicly for the first time Saturday [...]

Click to continue →

James Branch Cabell’s novel Jurgen (1919) is reviewed at my new favorite blog-slash-literary website, The Second Pass. The review begins with this evocative epigraph . . .
“I have finished Jurgen; a great and beautiful book, and the saddest book I ever read. I don’t know why, exactly. The book hurts me—tears me to small pieces—but [...]

Click to continue →

In 1818 Thomas Jefferson declared the “objects” of an education at the University of Virginia. To wit:
To give to every citizen the information he needs for the transaction of his own business.
To enable him to calculate for himself, and to express and preserve his ideas, his contracts, and accounts in writing.
To improve, by reading, his [...]

Click to continue →

Edgar Allan Poe’s 1849 obituary, as it appeared in the Baltimore Sun:
DEATH OF EDGAR A. POE — We regret to learn that Edgar A. Poe, Esq., the distinguished American poet, scholar and critic, died in this city yesterday morning, after an illness of four or five days. This announcement, coming so sudden and unexpected, will [...]

Click to continue →

The novelist William Hoffman died September 13. From the Richmond Times-Dispatch:

With 14 critically acclaimed novels and four short-story collections to his credit, author Henry William Hoffman should have been a literary giant, his fans said, but he never found mass-market fame.
“Bill Hoffman was probably Virginia’s least-known best writer—an author recognized by his peers for [...]

Click to continue →

Last week, on October 7, was the 160th anniversary of Edgar Allan Poe’s death. Meanwhile, the critic Allen Barra wonders if Poe really matters anymore:
Though he is still widely praised by most critics and his work still included in many anthologies, Poe may be fading into that twilight realm, indeed as he was as early [...]

Click to continue →

Well, almost. Yesterday we called attention to our Anne Spencer entry. Back in March, the Legacy Museum in Lynchburg screened a film by Keith Lee about the poet called Anne Spencer Revisited. Turns out Lee had originally wanted to do a dance, an idea that came to him after visiting Spencer’s Lynchburg home.
Keith Lee explained [...]

Click to continue →

Encyclopedia entries are deceptively hard to write, and our entries on writers are perhaps the most challenging. You want to get all the interesting biographical stuff in there while also doing justice to the art. Who is this poet as a person, but also who is this poet as a poet? On a good day, [...]

Click to continue →