Stéphane Mallarmé caught a glimpse of Arthur Rimbaud on only one occasion and it was the younger poet’s hands that stuck in his memory. These were, he later wrote, “vast hands, red with sores,” which ...

Is the brightest kind of maturity for us, right now at any rate. Reading those lines of Ashbery’s, or ones written much more recently or even earlier, one would never think to say that his tone has ...

The story, of course, is the stuff of legend: after a painful affair with the older, married poet Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud (1854–1891) put poetry behind him at age 21 and became a commercial traveler in ...