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Robert Frost: The Trickster on the Road.
“If we would understand poetry, let us be informed about a poet’s experience and crises out of which he speaks honestly if painfully. For at the heart of the poem …
6655321: The Clockwork Orange Dilemma
“The ideal reader of my novels is a lapsed Catholic and failed musician, short-sighted, color-blind, auditorily biased, who has read the books that I have read. He should also be …
The Speech JFK never gave.
Speeches have not become irrelevant, but they have lost their reverence in our modern age. In an always-on world, the oratorical flourish has been replaced by the sound bite and …
The quiet voice. Jefferson’s first inaugural.
Note to readers: Contemporaries of Thomas Jefferson would not be surprised that he left explicitly detailed instructions for the creation of his tombstone. “A plain die or cube of 3 …
Pat Conroy, Transcendence, and My Reading Life
Early in his novel, The Prince of Tides, Pat Conroy brings the character of Lila Wingo to life with this brief paragraph. “She saw the world through a dazzling prism of …
The decline of eloquence
One of my favorite lines from Shakespeare’s Hamlet is understandably overlooked. Like a tiny ship, those five words are swamped by such iconic leviathans as: “To be, or not to …
Nathaniel Hawthorne and the Veil of Sin
“What is this secret sin; this untold tale. That art cannot extract, not penance cleanse? Horace Walpole, 1768 On that bright, crisp Wednesday morning, there was the lingering smell of …
A Multitude of Sins. The Stories of Richard Ford
Age bestows its many gifts with a kind of mysterious grace. My father, a witness to the many horrors of World War II, developed a passion for gardening when he …
BakerMuse Essays 