The American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), whose June 27 birthday we celebrate today, was the first African American poet to attain an international reputation, and he stood as posthumous ...

The title of this poem subverts expectations right away. After all, we associate summer with pleasure: vacations, the beach, sunshine. Each line operates in the declarative. Many lines end with a ...

Even with the new school year starting, we still have a few more summer weeks ahead of us. I thought I’d share some poems. This first one hit me with immediacy as we are in the throws of fly season.

If you refuse to believe it ends badly, return to 6. 9 At the end of the summer, you wrote bad poetry. Inexplicable, s—ty, broken-down poetry that couldn’t even be called poetry. It was humiliating.

When “A Child’s Garden of Verses” appeared in 1885, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) was already failing, as the ups and downs of his consumption would lead to his death from a stroke at age 44. The ...