William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is about the allure of an imagined refuge. The poem’s distressed urban speaker fantasizes about fleeing the city and retreating to an idyllic Irish ...

Simone Weil says in a passage quoted in this anthology, “A test of what is real is that it is hard and rough. Joys are found in it.” Using Weil’s definition, this is the most real collection of poetry ...

If you have ever been in the enviable position of considering the difference between happiness and joy, you might find yourself nodding when the latter is characterized as being wilder and more ...

“The author is dead!” has been a consistent postmodernist refrain discouraging readers from reducing meanings of literary works to mere biographical outlines of their authors. Joy Ladin’s ...