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Literature & Poetry
Poetry in motion
Arts & Culture
By: Sarah Sweeney/
April 18, 2012
Fact-fussy readers help author to remember that a novel’s “air of reality” is among its supreme virtues.
On the page, life after prison
Author Tayari Jones, a Radcliffe fellow, is at work on her fourth novel, set in the American South. “Dear History” explores how a family comes to terms with a wrongful conviction.
Artist touts ‘primacy’ of images
The beauty of art, says William Kentridge in his Norton Lectures, is that it makes “a safe place for uncertainty.”
On the nature of modern thought
The story of 15th-century book hunter Poggio Bracciolini and his rediscovery of Lucretius’ “On the Nature of Things” was captured by Cogan University Professor Stephen Greenblatt in his National Book Award-winning account, “The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.”
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Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory Jorie Graham celebrated the legacy of Harvard poets such as T.S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, and Wallace Stevens, with a student performance of their verse in "Over the Centuries: Poetry at Harvard (A Love Story)."
Two of Jane Austen’s letters — thousands of which were written but only dozens of which were preserved — undergo careful repairs at Harvard, where they reside at Houghton Library.
Clarity and simplicity are frequent themes in the Harvard College Winter Writing Program, a two-week Winter Break seminar where undergraduate nonfiction writers learn from some of the country’s best authors, teachers, and journalists.
The Harvard Writers at Work lecture series, in its third year, offers public conversations on craft, collaboration, and even challenges to writing in the digital age.
Israeli author David Grossman spoke Tuesday about becoming immersed in his writing and his characters during a packed talk in the Science Center.
Houghton Library illustrates how the stuff of great literature is conserved, from the first jumbled box to the final neat archive.
Houghton, a template for university literary archives everywhere, also has room for the odd: A Thoreau pencil, a Dickinson teacup, and more.
James R. Russell Mashtots Professor of Armenian Studies, Faculty of Arts and Sciences
Homi K. Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities and the Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center, discusses his remembrance of September 11. Professor Bhabha’s project reflects on the decade since the tragedy through a series of poems installed within Harvard Yard.
An undergraduate on summer break is inspired to write a poem celebrating Harvard’s 375th anniversary.
Poet and fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Anna Maria Hong takes the traditional sonnet form and breaks it wide open in her new volume of poetry.
The eccentric diary of Boston recluse Arthur Crew Inman, published in 1985 by Harvard University Press, inspires a Hollywood film project.
Whistling through the darkness
Authors offer perspective on finding meaning in a secular age, using literature as a lens through which to understand how people found solace in the past.
Author and Harvard graduate Tracy Kidder is the first writer in residence at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. For the fall semester, he is sharing his insights about the art of writing with the Harvard community.
A Harvard conference discusses venerable, vulnerable print and its fate in the digital age.
Shakespeare, the inventive conservative
A new book by scholar Stephen Greenblatt probes topics that the playwright pushed to their limits: beauty and the cult of perfection, murderous hatred, the exercise of power, and artistic autonomy.
Thirteen workshops at Harvard book sites kick off a two-day conference, “Why Books?,” on the fate of print in a digital age.
Nicolau Sevcenko, now a professor of Romance languages and literatures at Harvard, reflects on the long journey that brought him here.
Former Harvard President Derek Bok and his wife Sissela, a Harvard fellow, discussed their recent books on happiness in a discussion at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
A new exhibition at Harvard’s Houghton Library explores the life of philosopher William James.
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