Jay Parini's biography of the poet, Theodore Roethke. Parini views Roethke through the lens of a Romantic poet. With this incredibly researched and well written work, Parini reaffirms Roethke's reputation as a poet that came into his own after the publication of "The Lost Son," and then continued...
When Alex Massolini's brother is killed in Vietnam, he drops out of Columbia University and leaves his conservative family behind for Capri to become secretary to Rupert Grant, a famous British novelist and poet who dominates the island like a latter -- day Prospero. Alex soon finds himself ensna...
They sat beside each other in low canvas chairs, an empty bottle of wine between them, and their glasses tipped in the sand. Except for meals, I rarely found them together, and was surprised to see them here. (My assumptions about their rivalry—which existed more in my head than in reality—were h...
The ego-feeling we are aware of now is thus only a shrunken vestige of a far more extensive feeling—a feeling which embraced the universe and expressed an inseparable connection of the ego with the external world. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents A notion of centrality: there is a core to ...