John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes” (Part One).  The first of a two-part episode that considers John Keats’ gorgeous poem.  Set in a dreamy medieval world of castles, blood feuds and esoteric folk rituals, Keats gives us a love story with some of the lushest and most opulent imagery in all of...

On the day the Nazis invade Poland, beginning the Second World War, a poet nurses a drink in a New York bar.  The unwarlike Auden has just immigrated to the United States from England, yet he feels a shadow rising behind him in the east that no one will be able to escape.  Auden looks without and...

Flannery O’Connor, The Lame Shall Enter First.  Sheppard is a high-minded liberal.  Norton is his disappointing young son, who seems indifferent to Sheppard’s moral crusades.  In the opening paragraphs of this short story Flannery O’Connor presents the two of them at breakfast.  Every detail of...