Description
"How can we know the dancer from the dance?" You may know the line, even if you don't know the poem it ends. I had the great pleasure of talking with one of the most accomplished poetry critics of our time, Dan Chiasson [https://www.wellesley.edu/english/faculty/chiassond], about that poem, William Butler Yeats's fascinating "Among School Children [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43293/among-school-children]."
Dan Chiasson was born and raised in the city of Burlington, Vermont, and received a BA in 1993 from Amherst College and a PhD from Harvard University in 2002. He has written regularly for The New Yorker [https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/dan-chiasson] and The New York Review of Books [https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/dan-chiasson/]. Chiasson is the author of six books, including five books of poetry, most recently The Math Campers [https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/646885/the-math-campers-by-dan-chiasson/] (Knopf, 2020), and one book of criticism, One Kind of Everything: Poem and Person in Contemporary America [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/O/bo4248227.html] (Chicago, 2007). He is at work on a study of politics and change in American life, Bernie for Burlington: His Rise in a Changing Vermont, 1964-1991, based partly on his own close observation of Sanders since Chiasson was nine years old. Dan Chiasson is Lorraine Chao Wang Professor of English at Wellesley College.
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