Tennyson has a poem, "The Vision of Sin," which contains the lines: "Every moment dies a man, Every moment one is born." Polymath Charles Babbage (inventor, engineer, and mathematician, considered by ...

What is poetry? Is it stanzas written on a page? The flow of words in a certain rhythm? And why have humans done it for thousands of years? These questions are at the heart of a—relatively ...

If you think poetry isn't for you, this might be the right time to give it a second chance. Every April in the United States, National Poetry Month invites you to experience and celebrate an art form ...

Humans spend most of their waking hours playing with what novelist Rudyard Kipling called “the most powerful drug used by mankind”—words. In the laboratories of our minds, we sort, slice, and string ...

Poetry is close to my heart. I would be lost without its very specific magic, its ability to spark wonder and shock and to open up fresh vistas on life in God. But as W. H. Auden famously says in his ...

April is National Poetry Month, and this week we revive an old tradition by devoting an entire issue to the form. But first we ask a very basic question: What is poetry, anyway? There’s no simple ...

Audre Lorde told us this in 1977. Although she spoke specifically to women, I hope she won’t mind me saying that her words can apply to other folks, too. She wrote: “poetry is not a luxury. It is a ...