Robert Bly is a poet who may be best known for Iron John, his classic nonfiction work about the emotional lives of men. But for the past five decades he's also worn another hat: that of a translator. Bly, who reads from his work at the Burlington Book Festival finale this Sunday, hasn't just tinkered away at the odd foreign poet. He is like a one-man U.N. Since 1960, the 78-year-old poet has shepherded more than two dozen poets into English from languages as diverse as Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish, Hindi, Chinese and German.... Read more

Poets and linguists don't often see eye to eye when it comes to language. While linguists have a weakness for equations, poets nurse a soft spot for mysticism. In his Nobel lecture, Seamus Heaney compared his first aural experiences to time travel. In "The Prelude," William Wordsworth took a walk in the woods and found a new god in the mountains around him. "There is a dark / inscrutable workmanship that reconciles / Discordant elements," he wrote, studying the trees around him.... Read more

Those who write nature poetry today face a double challenge: Not only is the mode of expression out of date -- but the subject is, too. How does one make a reader sigh over a wheat field when so many Americans have never seen one? Is there a way to make a reader treasure a slice of farm life revealed if they've never smelled the stench of actual manure?... Read more

Not all poetry comes to us whole. Paper erodes, tablets are smashed. We will never retrieve much of what was delivered orally. In a recent translation of Sappho, the ancient Greek female poet, the classicist Anne Carson reminds us how flagrantly time steals. "On a papyrus roll the text is written in columns . . . To read such a text is hard even when it comes to us in its entirety and most papyri don't. Of the nine books of lyrics that Sappho is said to have composed, one poem has survived complete. All the rest are fragments."... Read more

University of Vermont professor and poet Major Jackson comes from the streets of Philadelphia. Read one of his poems and you will not forget that fact. To Jackson, every bombed-out building there is mythic, every housing project a thing of beauty. In his award-winning 2002 debut, Leaving Saturn, Jackson announced he would sing the body electric of this place:

I watched
a mother straddle a stoop of brushes, combs,
a jar of ROYAL CROWN. She was fingering rows
dark as alleys on a young girl's head cocked
to one side like a MODIGLIANI. I pledged... Read more

By the spring of 414 B.C., when Aristophanes' play The Birds debuted on the Greek stage, Athenians were weary of their government's imperialism. The Peloponnesian War had taken their men and eroded their resources. An attack on the neutral island of Sicily seemed destined to provoke more losses.... Read more

Boogiemen do not enjoy a long afterlife in this country -- unless, of course, they become legends. In the past, newspapers could effect this transformation. Today the fieriest kiln is Hollywood. Thus one can bet Sen. Joseph McCarthy will be remembered a while longer, thanks to Good Night, and Good Luck. Shot in elegant black and white, the 2005 film vividly re-imagines television newsman Edward R. Murrow's attack on McCarthy's witch-hunt.... Read more

America loves second acts, but it also likes third, fourth and fifth ones. Just look at the life of Mark Twain. Born Samuel Longhorne Clemens in the tiny hamlet of Florida, Missouri, in 1835, the country's funniest writer appears to have been the busiest as well. During his life Clemens was a Mississippi river-boat pilot, a journalist, a traveling lecturer, raconteur, lover, society host, publisher and passionate critic of American imperialism. Sometimes all at once. Along the way, he also wrote three novels that became American classics.... Read more

To get to the inner sanctum of John Irving's huge mountaintop home in Dorset, a visitor must walk past a long row of shelves of the author's books, seemingly printed in as many languages as there are countries. At the end of the hall is the heart of the home, a long, cozy room that stretches toward the horizon like the prow of a ship. And at its center sits Irving, the 63-year-old author best known for his much-loved 1978 novel The World According to Garp, as well as his near fanatical passion for wrestling.... Read more

Every time my dad's birthday rolls around, I go to my local independent shop and ogle books I want to buy him. Four years ago I was convinced The Corrections would make him understand why I wasn't going to have children. This year, I barely resisted the urge to drop that quintessential father's day cliche on him: a biography by David McCullough.... Read more