At the time of its publication, Nima Yushij’s “Qoqnus” (The Phoenix) emerged as a radical departure from the norms and conventions of classical Persian poetry. Nima employed phoenix symbolism in this poem to present his zeal for a literary renaissance. Likewise, George Darley (1795-1846), the Irish Romantic poet who found himself lonely and isolated at the mitigating time borders of Romanticism...

Next began the muskegs, which almost entirely stood under water; these we had to cross for miles; think with what misery, every step up to our knees. . . . The whole of this land of the Lapps was mostly muskeg, here called stygx. A priest could never so describe hell, because it is no more horrible. Never have poets been able to picture the Styx so foul, since that is no fouler.—CAROLUS LINNAEU...

“Human rights are like love,” Koskenniemi suggests, “both necessary and impossible.” An eccentricity? Equations of law and love may seem like the stuff of poets, not legal theorists, let alone practitioners. And yet, Koskenniemi, the leading public international lawyer, finds among legal theorists an unlikely ally in his claim that law and love are interrelated. Ernest Weinrib, perhaps the lead...

Philosophers and Poets, from their perch on the cutting edge of reason, have always seen the advantage of anxiety. It is the “dizziness of reason,” argued Soren Kierkegaard; “the handmaiden of creativity,” said T.S. Eliot; “the beginning of conscience,” observed novelist Angela Carter. So have actors backstage, summoning eternal energies and edges for the roles they play, and sprinters on the b...