Stephen Burt teaches at Harvard and is the author, most recently, of The Art of the Sonnet (with David Mikics) and Parallel Play.
Books by four poets about big modern systems whose results and failures seem inescapable.
W.B. Yeats’s poems on Ireland contemplate failures: not of poetry but of public life in all its forms.
Few modern poets served so long an apprenticeship as Basil Bunting, none had so adventurous a life and few poets' lives have produced such lasting rewards.
How much, in just twenty years, Donald Revell has changed! From the Abandoned Cities (1983), his debut volume, included a villanelle, a sestina, rhymed sonnets and meditative terza rima.