Daryl

Grief demands language, but the words that arrive first are almost always the ones we have heard a thousand times. If you have ever sat down to write about loss and felt every line slip into something familiar, you are not alone. Learning how to write poetry about grief without resorting to cliches means training … Read more

When Wilfred Owen sat down in a Scottish war hospital in 1917 to revise a poem about a chlorine gas attack, he could not have known he was about to write what millions of readers would call the most powerful anti-war poem ever written. “Dulce et Decorum Est” did something no political speech or newspaper … Read more

George Eliot’s Middlemarch is called the greatest English novel because no other work of English fiction matches its combination of psychological depth, moral complexity, and narrative sophistication. Published in eight parts between 1871 and 1872, it weaves together the lives of an entire provincial town with a precision and sympathy that critics, writers, and readers … Read more

Every beginning poet hits the same wall sooner or later. You write a poem, read it back, and it sounds like someone else wrote it. Maybe it sounds like the poet you read last night, or the lyrics from a song you love, or a high school English teacher’s idea of what poetry should be. … Read more

Every New Year’s Eve, millions of people around the world link arms and sing “Auld Lang Syne” without a second thought. Most of them could not tell you who wrote it. Even fewer realize that the man behind that song produced some of the most empathetic, radical, and enduring poetry in the English language. Robert … Read more

Here is something most poetry workshops will not tell you: the first line of your poem probably matters less than you have been led to believe. If you have ever sat frozen in front of a blank page, convinced that the entire fate of your poem rests on a single opening sentence, you are not … Read more

The first time I read “The Windhover” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, I felt like I had been shoved. Not by anything physical, mind you, but by language itself. The words tumbled and leapt and crashed together in a way no other poem I had encountered ever had. I had to go back and read it … Read more

You sit down with the intention to write, and nothing arrives. The page stays blank, or worse — you start a line, delete it, start again, and abandon the whole attempt. If you are wondering how to overcome writer block when a poem will not come, the answer is rarely about trying harder. It is … Read more

If you have ever read a poem that made you laugh and flinch at the same time, there is a good chance Philip Larkin wrote it. He is the poet people quote at dinner parties, in essays, on social media, and at funerals. He is also the one England associates with gloom, disappointment, and a … Read more

My hands shook so badly the paper rattled. I had written the poem six months earlier, edited it twenty times, and practiced it in my bathroom mirror until my neighbors probably thought I was arguing with myself. But standing in front of that microphone at my first open mic, I forgot how breathing worked. I … Read more