The American Scholar

The English country house has been on the brink of ruination since at least the start of World War I—or perhaps the first chug of the Industrial Revolution—or was it the end of serfdom …? Propping up this dying, decadent institution has been a favored pastime of preservationists, architecture buffs, and earls for about as long as the institution has been around. In his new book, Noble Ambitions, historian Adrian Tinniswood peels back the wallpaper to show how these ancestral piles survived both

Paul Celan: A Life by Anna Arno, translated by Soren Gauger; Belknap Press, 416pp., $35 Paul Celan, perhaps foremost among postwar German-language poets, was born in 1920 in the Romanian city of Cernăuți and died in Paris 50 years later. His was not a long life, though other poets whose work continues to fascinate scholars and readers alike—John Keats, Arthur Rimbaud, Sylvia Plath, to name a few—died even younger. That most of those readers who sing Celan’s praises encounter his work in translat

My best friends from childhood are twins, so they always give and receive the happy birthday wish at the same time. It wouldn’t have to be at exactly the same time: One could leave a message on the other’s phone, I suppose. But in their case, I think it must always have been done together, the two united across the wires or through a satellite when not actually spending the day together. Still, someone has to say it first: One must start. That was true too at birth. Same birthday, but one was bo

Amanda Holmes reads Grace Cavalieri’s “A Field of Finches Without Sight Still Singing.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “A Field of Finches Without Sight Still Singing” by Grace Cavalieri appeared first on The American Scholar.

After taking a short detour to craft a Talking Pictures quiz on classic 20th-century movies (find the answers here), your poetry team captain is back with a review of the April centos and a new prompt featuring a venerable poetic line. As of June, the call for centos—poems composed entirely of lines lifted from other sources—had provoked more than 100 responses, including “Bygone” from NLP all-star Charise Hoge: I took the lake between my legs. Eight mallard ducks fly over to the angel’s skin. T

Tierra de Campos, meaning land of fields, is a broad swath of open farmland on the Meseta, Spain’s northern plateau, in the community of Castilla y León. I’ve driven through Tierra de Campos a dozen times in the past three years on my way to and from footraces in the provinces of Palencia and Valladolid, and I’m always glad to be in this place of big skies, dry fields over rolling hills, and long horizons. At the right hour and in the right season with the right weather, the landscape can seem a

Amanda Holmes reads James Agee’s “Sure on This Shining Night.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Sure on This Shining Night”  by James Agee appeared first on The American Scholar.

Little Blue Dot: How GPS Shaped the Modern World by Katherine Dunn; Bloomsbury, 384 pp., $29.99 Not so very long ago, getting from here to there involved the awkward origami of unfolding a large paper map in the confines of a car, or depending on the kindness of strangers. Only in the past two decades have we shifted our allegiance to the electronic maps easily accessible in our dashboard or pocket. But our confidence in maps, our belief that they mean only to serve us, has always been somewhat

It’s Pollinator Week, and the bugs need us more than ever. Not just bees: butterflies, moths, wasps, flies, beetles, midges, hummingbirds … Around 90 percent of the world’s flowering plants and 75 percent of our major food crops rely on pollinators, and they’re dying. Nowhere is insect decline more intimately entwined with our own than with honeybees, 2.7 million colonies of which are hauled around the country to pollinate American crops—most often, California almond trees. Since 2012, Jen

I used to have a good instinct, when talking with my students, for the bumps in their sentences. I knew immediately whether an unusual word or phrase was imaginative and exciting, or confusing, or plain wrong. Every word vibrated, and I felt them all. My finger, it seemed, was on the pulse of the language. Or maybe it was that the language pulsed through me, like blood. English was, after all, my mother tongue. Besides unpredictable spelling, a ton of irregular verbs, and the innumerable phrasal

Amanda Holmes reads Lisel Mueller’s “Hope.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Hope” by Lisel Mueller appeared first on The American Scholar.

Francisco Moreno’s paintings are an art historian’s dream, full of allegories and references to well-known paintings. He grew up in Mexico City, watching his grandmother paint in her studio. She took Moreno to see Diego Rivera’s murals when he was young, which left him awestruck by “the ambition of the work, the combination of painting and architecture,” he says. Rivera’s career trajectory stood out to Moreno—how the former “left painting in Paris to go study Giotto in Italy, to return to Mexico

This piece originally appeared on our website on June 18, 2020. “There’s been a heap of Juneteenths before this one and I’ll tell you there’ll be a heap more before we’re truly free. Yes! But keep to the rhythm, just keep to the rhythm and keep to the way.” —Ralph Ellison, Juneteenth Juneteenth is a word that glows with wonder. Literally, it names a day in African-American and American history: June 19, 1865. You would never know that without closing your eyes and diving into the past. On that

At the corner opposite the sports center where I turn left on my way through town, I saw an elderly man step off the curb and angle toward the crosswalk. He was not frail-looking, but he moved stiffly and advanced slowly, his walking stick in one hand and a bag of groceries swinging from the other. For all appearances, he was oblivious, in his own world. I put my blinker on but didn’t press forward: I wanted to give him time. In addition to the sports center, one high school and two primary scho

Amanda Holmes reads James Merrill’s “Days of 1964.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “Days of 1964” by James Merrill appeared first on The American Scholar.

Remembering Roots: How an American Classic Transformed the World by Lucas L. Johnson II; Broadleaf, 221 pp., $25.99 Learning about slavery as an elementary school student meant being hit by a wave of emotions I didn’t yet know how to process: anger and sadness, most definitely, but also shame and embarrassment. In a classroom of Black and brown and white students, discussion of human bondage functioned like an unwritten invitation for the non-Black kids to direct inquisitive looks at the Black k

Were you a geek? A nerd? Did you play Magic: The Gathering, paint Warhammer miniatures, learn to speak Klingon or Elvish, or memorize whole scenes from Star Trek? If so, then good news: it might have taken a few broken eyeglasses and shoves in high school, but geek culture has finally triumphed. Dragons are cool, Star Wars has never had more fans, and everyone is geeking out over the latest sci-fi release on Netflix. How did this happen? And how have the changing demographics of geekdom affected

It was in early October, at the beginning of the school year, and I had just returned from work. My neighbor was in the lane in front of his house, busily sweeping the narrow sidewalk, and I greeted him. He comes every day to open up the house, water the plants, and tend to one thing or another. He takes immaculate care of the old homestead, though no one lives there anymore. He’s all about preserving the past. He was surprised to see me—wasn’t I home earlier than usual? No—fewer hours this year

Amanda Holmes reads Frank O’Hara’s “For Grace, After a Party.” Have a suggestion for a poem by a (dead) writer? Email us: podcast@theamericanscholar.org. If we select your entry, you’ll win a copy of a poetry collection edited by David Lehman. This episode was produced by Stephanie Bastek and features the song “Canvasback” by Chad Crouch. The post “For Grace, After a Party” by Frank O’Hara appeared first on The American Scholar.

As a middle-schooler, Jason McDonald never dreamed that an introductory glass-blowing class for youth at Hilltop Artists in Tacoma, Washington, would lead him to a career as an award-winning artist. “It’s an exclusive craft; it’s remarkably expensive,” he says. “It’s about a dollar a minute to exist in the studio. There’s very little representation within the craft because of its super high buy-in and the fact that it takes a decade to start producing anything worth selling.” After dropping out