my dreams, my works… by Gwendolyn Brooks

“Bright star” by John Keats

John Keats, poetry, and the romance of a short life –On burning brightly and finding artistic validation in death It’s time to revel in some early 19th century English romance with the poster boy of tragedy and posthumous artistic validation.  John Keats, the bright star, was the very personification of a young romantic. He was everything...

my dreams, my works… by Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry, poverty, and a Pulitzer prize What Brooks taught the world about the beauty of community and being a black woman in America Gwendolyn Brooks is an earthy, plainspoken, unpretentious American legend. She won countless awards including a Pulitzer prize and is known around the globe as Chicago’s First Lady of Poetry. She is a...

Hélas by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: Poetry and aesthetics Take a closer look at the Irish playwright’s life and the fashionable, indulgent myth he built up around himself

My Divine Lysis by Juana Ines de la Cruz

Episode 4 is a real treat because we’re discussing a feminist icon, a Mexican legend, a religious prodigy, and one of the most loved female poets in recent history.  In her lifetime, Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote several plays, poems, and essays. Two volumes of works were published while she was alive. The last...

25 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

When most people hear Beat Generation, a few big names rise to the surface of their brains. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso. But one name sometimes gets buried behind the scenes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you ask him, Ferlinghetti says that he was never a Beat poet. Yet that was the world in which he immersed himself, as...