A couple of weeks ago I traveled to London for the wedding of a very old friend.

English poetry without (most of) the Protestants

How shall a man not sing?

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

As someone who has kept a diary off and on since I was 6, I am always quite fascinated by diaries in archives. Recently as an eccentric technical exercise I put the diary I kept every day for 8 months...

In the last of my summer reposts, I’m revisiting a slightly updated version of a piece on e.

This is a review of Emily Wilson’s recent essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea: Journeys through Ancient Literature (Profile, 2026).

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere, including Substack.

Reading Philip Gross since 1989

Reading Philip Gross since 1989

Suggestions from the beginner to the adventurous

For paid subscribers, this is a slightly expanded version of the review of Henry Power’s new book Homer-Haunted: The Many Afterlives of an Ancient Poet, originally commissioned for Portico (Portico is...

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

Silius Italicus in the 1650s

Lineage of joy into mortality hurled

Some thoughts + a truly massive list of suggested reading in footnote 5

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A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

On Virgil, Callimachus, Homer, Heraclitus, Shakespeare and Seamus Heaney

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

Review of "The Penguin Book of Spiritual Verse. 101 Poets on the Divine", edited by Kaveh Akbar

On Horace, Odes 3.21

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere.

Those of you who read the New York Review of Books might have noticed an article by David Wheatley a couple of weeks ago about Scottish poetry, reviewing Kathleen Jamie’s Cairn (which I haven’t read) ...

All dagled o'er from face to feet / What with Raine and their own Sweat

Government report will warn of a ‘lost generation’ as number of ‘Neets’ rises to highest level in 12 years

Tennyson's 'Palace of Art' and mixed feelings about romanticism

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A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere,.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reviewing a couple of different books about Homer and his “afterlife” — the myriad ways in which the Iliad and the Odyssey stand behind and within so much of our lite...

Was Prynne better than Hill?

A couple of weeks ago I published a translation of an untitled poem by the French poet Valérie Rouzeau in The Sonneteer. I was grateful to Ken for publishing both the French and the English of this po...

Erasmus, Robert Graves and Matthew Buckley Smith

A personal selection of posts from around the Anglophone blogosphere, including Substack, with a commitment to following a somewhat haphazardly chosen selection of poets, poetry lovers, literary cr…

Of all the vernacular verse forms popular in the early Renaissance, the sonnet was the one that had the most spectacular literary success, breaking out from its Italian origins into Spanish, French, P...