Taniguchi Buson, or Yosa Buson, was an influential painter and poet during the Edo period. Born in a suburb of Osaka, Japan, Buson was an orphan who eventually moved to Edo to study painting and haiku poetry in the tradition of Basho. He first gained notice for his visual art -- like much traditional
It might seem as if she lived an entire lifetime during the writing of "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek." Her voice is that of a wizened old woman with boundless patience and an endless amount of time to observe the smallest sublime moments in nature. But in fact, Annie Dillard wrote the book while she was s
T. S. Eliot looked out on the landscape of the modern world after World War I and saw a place of disillusionment, shattered community, and lost spirituality. His poems describe the greyness of this sterile terrain and summon the traditions of the past -- both literary and religious -- to transcend t
Jorge Luis Borges had a twisted sense of time. He placed us on the precipice of an infinite event, concentrating past, present, and future in a single coruscating constellation of time. Inspired by the philosophy of Leibnitz, Borges always presented us with a multiplicity of possible worlds. But