Poems by Derek Walcott selected and introduced by Edward Hirsch
How corporations, for better and worse, came to dominate American life.
Pundits bemoan the decline of loyalty in America, but the real problem is that Americans feel the tug of too many loyalties. That excess of allegiances makes it harder to forge a unum out of the nation's often bewildering pluribus.
In that eternal city of the imagination, novelist R. K. Narayan’s Malgudi, things began to happen after August 15, 1947:
When he journeyed to the northernmost permanent settlement in North America, the last thing our author expected was a mystical experience.
Before his death last year, J. B. Jackson stood virtually unchallenged as the pre-eminent scholar of the American landscape. Here, in one of his final essays, Jackson turned his thoughts to leisure, and found that where we play our games often says as much about us as what we choose to play.
The poetry of Walter de la Mare selected and introduced by Anthony Hecht