William Butler Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” is about the allure of an imagined refuge. The poem’s distressed urban speaker fantasizes about fleeing the city and retreating to an idyllic Irish ...

If you have ever been in the enviable position of considering the difference between happiness and joy, you might find yourself nodding when the latter is characterized as being wilder and more ...

The daughter of a Native American father and a mother both Native American and white, poet Joy Harjo knew early the pain caused by prejudice. “I started writing to save my life,” she says. It was a ...

CIARAN CARSON is one of the most accomplished among the astonishing number of formidable poets who have issued from Ulster over the last three generations. In his elegy on the death of Yeats, Auden ...

I started a Joy Harjo reading jag the summer before last in Santa Fe, New Mexico, at op. cit., a magical store in whose forest of books, new and older, I picked up her 2012 memoir, Crazy Brave. I knew ...

In the church where I was raised, adults made a sharp distinction between joy and happiness. Happiness felt good, but it was temporary, and because it was temporary, there was something about it not ...

“The author is dead!” has been a consistent postmodernist refrain discouraging readers from reducing meanings of literary works to mere biographical outlines of their authors. Joy Ladin’s ...