Of Joan Didion’s clipped style in A Book of Common Prayer, Martin Amis once remarked: “The most poetic thing about Miss Didion’s prose in this novel is that it doesn’t go all the way across the page.” ...

IT IS usually dangerous for anyone whose gift is one art to attempt to follow another. The pitfalls of following poetry when your gift is prose are obvious enough to ...

Mario Cuomo once famously remarked, "You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose." This metaphor, highlighting the shift from rhetoric to reality, applies to various contexts. A good example is the ...

This week, Alice Fulton’s poem “Claustrophilia” appears in the magazine. Last week, I chatted with Fulton over e-mail about word choice, the difference between prose and poetry, and the musicality of ...

When most people think of fantasy, they picture sprawling wars, fire-breathing dragons, and quests for crowns. But another branch of the genre has been quietly flourishing: lyrical fantasy. These are ...

“Verily and forsooth, the yellowy sun drippeth down upon the meadhall like a cockatrice egg fresh cracked, as maid Marian McMcgillicutty Penrose-Smyth runs a fine mahogany comb through her wild ...

The critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), known best in his lifetime for his writing on Shakespeare, was a jack of all trades and a master of none too few, trying his deft hand at painting, philosophy, ...