He wrote poems with punch.

He insisted that he was a poet, no matter what the medium.

“It is not at all with ideas that one makes poetry. It is with words.”

He wrote poetry of love glimpsed as a mystery from within the teeth of sex.

“Master of the whimsical tone, the unexpected insight, the hidden bite.”

The life of ROBERT GRAVES (1895–1985) is as an impenetrable forest, tree…

Out of Bedlamite shrieks, a Melvillean lucidity.

A wandering, committed poet of crepuscular love.

An analyst of excess as well as a practitioner.

OGDEN NASH (1902-71) was the American master of light verse, an art…

The very public tragedies in the life of TED HUGHES (1930-98) sometimes…

Until he was nearly 50, CHARLES BUKOWSKI (1920-94), drinker, womanizer, brawler and…

ANNA AKHMATOVA (1889-1966) was the Joni Mitchell of her day, strikingly angular…

You can grok many modernists through the forms of tradition they undermine…

I know it’s a bold claim, but JOSEPH BRODSKY (1940-96) just might…

Absurdity’s great-uncle; Freudian punchline, with all those noses of yours (a procession…