The encounter with literature of the Holocaust, saturated as it is with unfathomable grief, loss, terror, and death, presents its readers with difficulties rare in literatures not dealing with the extreme. Specifically, usual academic discourse lacks a register for addressing the intense emotions that Holocaust narratives or poetry may generate.…

Although evaluation is at the core of many of the practices associated with poetry--including teaching, editing, selecting, judging, and even writing--and although there have been involved discussions of the assessment of verse, there has been no empirical investigation of the specific values which, one supposes, lie at the heart of such…

Reflection in its most general sense just means thinking, so that a reflection upon nature amounts to thinking about the more-than-human world. Implied, however, is a particular kind of thinking, first and foremost a product of philosophical idealism and the analogical or mimetic imagination. This implication goes largely unexplored in…

From September 2008 to July 2009, the author traded academic robes for the Army Combat Uniform issued to US Navy personnel deploying to Afghanistan. Along with using the ceramic and Kevlar body armor he learned to don at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, he metaphorically defended himself from the disruption to his personal and professional life that…

Trauma theory has been and continues to be important to critical work in every period of literary study. This essay argues that the subtle literary strategies of one fourteenth-century poem can help to address a blockage about representation current in that theory. Geoffrey Chaucer's "Troilus and Criseyde" meditates upon trauma by rendering…

The author responds to the essays in this special issue by noting that they emphasize the importance of careful, complex comparisons between Western and Chinese rhetorical traditions.

A satire on literary analysis and criticism. (RD)

Distinguishes more than three modes of poetic discourse as ways in which writers interrelate the verbal presentation of vision and the artistic representation of action. (Author)

Poets usually employ enjambement to communicate experiences in which, after repeated frustration, a human subject suddenly overcomes limitations and goes beyond previous limits. (DD)

In both Frost and Lowell the most compelling gesture of obligation is the final demur, the turning away into silence. (DD)

The author gives the reader a detailed analysis of metaphor. He classifies them in four distinct groups and gives many examples to prove his point. (MR)

Respondents agreed that the best poetry currently is being published in "Poetry,""New Yorker," and "American Poetry Review." (JH)