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 ...

When Brad Leithauser, now a professor in the Writing Seminars, came across an article about Iceland in 1984—years before the country's emergence in the late 1990s as a hip tourist spot—he knew he had ...

Somewhere between the hack writer living off the slicks and the "divine afflatus" genius penning prose lyrics incomprehensible to all but himself, lies the elusive middle road that all young writers ...

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, ...