He was like the playful boy described in the lovely poem “Birches” (1915), bending tree branches beyond recognition, then letting them snap back to their natural state, all for his own amusement.

Their poems are part of world history and culture. Poets should and must document the destruction and horrors of war. But can poetry ameliorate a war or hasten a peaceful resolution? Perhaps ...

Nevertheless, for this poem, and for the first time in his career, Frost got paid—$15, by the editor of a New York weekly called The Independent. “On reading ‘My Butterfly,’ ” Adam Plunkett writes in ...

And if you ask me how, I do not know. I only feel it, and I’m torn in two. Seamus Heaney’s love-poem to marriage, The Skunk, combines exile and erotica, moving from an American wilderness ...