Micheal 
I still remember the first time I played a dusty thrift store find on my turntable. The pops and crackles were so loud I almost gave up on the record entirely. That experience sent me down a rabbit hole of testing record cleaning kits for collectors, and honestly, it changed my entire relationship with vinyl. … Read more
When someone we admire passes away, language offers us two powerful ways to respond: the elegy and the eulogy. Both honor the dead, but they do so in very different ways. The difference between an elegy and a eulogy comes down to form, tone, and purpose. An elegy is a mournful poem that laments a … Read more
You open a poem, read it twice, and still feel like you missed something. That knot in your stomach when you hit a line that refuses to make sense, the worry that everyone else gets it and you do not, the sense that poetry is a private club you somehow never got the password for. … Read more
Blank verse has a strict five-beat rhythm but no rhyme. Free verse has no rhyme and no fixed rhythm at all. That single difference – meter versus no meter – is the entire answer to the blank verse vs free verse question, and it is also the reason people keep mixing them up. Both forms … Read more
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” These two lines close John Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn (), and they have provoked argument, awe, and frustration for over two centuries. Students often ask me what Keats actually meant by the famous couplet. … Read more
I want to begin with the part no one says out loud: feeling lost in a poem is not a sign that you are missing something. It is the poem doing its job. Most of us were taught, somewhere along the way, that a poem is a puzzle with a hidden answer. A code. A … Read more
Yes, the Duke murdered his wife in Robert Browning’s 1842 dramatic monologue “My Last Duchess.” The poem makes this clear through one chilling line near the end: “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together.” The Duke ordered her death because she smiled too freely at others and refused to treat his family name … Read more
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Ozymandias is not just a poem about a fallen pharaoh. Written in 1818 after the poet learned of a broken statue of Ramses II in the Egyptian desert, this 14-line sonnet warns us that all political power is temporary, all human pride is misplaced, and only art survives when monuments crumble. The … Read more
Poetry can feel impossible to crack. You sit down with a poem, read it once, get lost, read it again, get more lost, and somewhere around the third pass a voice in your head whispers, “I’m missing something obvious.” That voice is lying. What you’re missing isn’t a secret decoder ring. You’re missing a method, … Read more
How can Death die in John Donne’s Death Be Not Proud? This is one of the most famous lines in English poetry, and it has puzzled readers for over four hundred years. Donne’s answer is both simple and shocking: because of the Christian resurrection, Death is not the final word. In fact, Death is the … Read more