‘It’s as if no other poet except Williams had really seen America or heard its language’, wrote Robert Lowell in 1962, near the end of the elder bard’s life: ‘His flowers rustle by the superhighways and pick up all our voices.’ Some decades earlier, Mike Gold, the editor of New Masses magazine, predicted that ‘[w]hen […]
About Ciarán O'Rourke
One of the best books about the Haitian Revolution
There are many excellent and inspiring books about the Haitian Revolution, one of the richest and most insightful of which is The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott. The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution by Julius S. Scott In early […]
The poet John Clare: Freedom and Anguish
The poet John Clare was born on 13 July 1793, on the same day that Jean-Paul Marat, the zealous Jacobin revolutionary who believed that ‘man has the right to deal with his oppressors by devouring their palpitating hearts’, was assassinated. John Clare died 20 May 1864, a week before the United States Congress formally recognised […]
Did Seamus Heaney write political poems?
A review of On Seamus Heaney by Roy Foster Although known for his active support of the South African anti-Apartheid movement and for his open opposition to the American invasion of Iraq in 2003, Irish poet and Nobel-prize winner Seamus Heaney was not famous for his politics. This has led some sceptics to dismiss the […]
David Graeber’s Politics, An Appreciation
“Say what you like about nurses, garbage collectors, or mechanics,” declared anthropologist David Graeber in 2013, it’s obvious that were they to vanish in a puff of smoke, the results would be immediate and catastrophic. A world without teachers or dock-workers would soon be in trouble, and even one without science fiction writers or ska […]