Perhaps unconsciously seeking another literary pilgrimage, right around the same time as the publication in the TLS, I read Pablo Neruda's 1971 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, entitled ¨Towards the Splendid City. ¨ He spoke of his journey of exile, to freedom, a struggle to cross the Andes Mountains to escape the government of his homeland, who w...

I think poetry is at least as accesible to young children as is prose, if not more so. It's raw emotional and visual core intuitively appeal to young pre-intellctual minds who are devouring language at far greater pace then they ever will for the rest of their lives. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger writes, "Language, by naming beings for...