SEPTEMBER 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem. By Ian Sansom. Harper. 341 pages. $27.99. The subtitle for Ian Samson’s book “September 1, 1939: A Biography of a Poem,” is such an unexpected combination of ...

Anyone who needs a good laugh right now will enjoy this collection of stories in poem form and will want to check out other works by Kenney. “Love Poems for Anxious People” is published by G.P. Putnam ...

TS Eliot’s life and influences are meticulously investigated in this impressive account of artistic creation A century ago, a man with a double life published one of the most celebrated, anthologised ...

To understand this poem, you don’t need biography. Your own personal understanding of the loss of innocence and the pain of mortality serve just as well as Thomas’s disastrous attempts at adulting.

We tend to think of John Keats as, in Lucasta Miller’s provocative phrase, “the most romantic of the Romantic poets.” He’s the pure soul—so the legend goes—who died at only 25, penniless, passionately ...

Sitting in a bar on 52nd Street, WH Auden read in the “folded lie” of a newspaper about the accession of Danzig to the Third Reich. The poem he would write about the events of that night is the ...

Hollis brilliantly sifts through the tendrils of TS Eliot’s unhappiness and shows how, with help from friends, he broke through his tortured silence to create an era-defining poem Even if you flinch ...

"The eminences that you are in the presence of do teach you,” says acclaimed biographer Megan Marshall. “Even if not directly how to write a poem, there are messages about life that are significant ...