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 ...

A poem written by Ted Hughes about the death of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, was inspired by an “enigmatic parting love letter” she wrote to him just days before she died, according to a new ...

"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 ...

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 ...

In 1922, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca was involved in the organisation and promotion of a music festival designed to celebrate Gypsy music, and to draw cultural attention to the “authentic” ...

This is read by an automated voice. Please report any issues or inconsistencies here. With apologies to T. S. Eliot, December might be the cruelest month — at least for publishing. As imprints focus ...

“I have a natural horror of letting people see how my mind works,” a 23-year-old John Ashbery wrote to the painter Jane Freilicher in 1950. It’s not a surprising sentiment. Ashbery, who will turn 90 ...

In the winter of 1949, a group of judges — including poets T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell — met to decide the winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize for the best book of poetry published in the ...