Editors’ Note: When we talk about the context of literary production, gender and race (rightly) get a lot of space for debate and discussion, but talking about class makes us squirm. To confront, ...

Editors' Note: This essay is one of a group of responses to Daniel Tiffany's "Cheap Signaling." Read the rest. In Plato's dialogue, Socrates tries to determine whether Ion has learned anything from ...

“Breathturn Into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry, A Bilingual Edition” by Paul Celan, translated and with commentary by Pierre Joris (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 736 pages, $40) How do you make ...

In my writing and teaching, I’ve come to understand the value of the word “diction” in solving some of my most important language problems. It comes from the Latin word for “oratory” and “speech” and ...

Geoffrey Brock’s anthology of twentieth-century Italian poetry offers the risk of a counter-eloquence. Poetry, said Robert Frost, is what is lost in translation. Consider the opposite formulation: ...