Marjorie Perloff is a poetry critic and professor emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-garde poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and, especially, postmod

Intense, Pioneering, Smart

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was an exceptional seventeenth-century nun who set precedents for feminism long before the term or concept existed. Her "Respuesta" is a maverick work outlining the logical sense of women's education more than 200 years before Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Her poetry, meanw

17th century literature, Feminist, Pioneering, Religious, Sublime

The period between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, though a time of cultural ferment in the former colonies, was marked by an identity crisis. It was a time when the country was young and the influence of European art and philosophy was strong. The most praised writers were sycophants: Cooper wrote

Ecstatic, Elegant, Pathos, Pioneering, Sincere, Transcendentalism, Witty

Plato taught that the body is the mere avatar of the soul, its prison, or even its tomb. His student Aristotle, on the other hand, turned the order of things around. He conceived the soul as the emergent truth of the body, the body's most complete and self-fulfilling actualization. Obviously, Ari

Classical, Classical rhetoric, Clever, Contemplative, Eclectic, Masculine, Pioneering