Scratch That: Taylor Swift is a Dime-Store Novelist

The poet Haley Hodges has recently written a winsome essay for Cassandra Voices claiming that the Galactic Empress, Her Swiftiness, Queen of Ubiquity, is our “greatest confessional poet.” Let’s leave aside that Tay-Tay isn’t a poet—that song-writing and poetry-writing are different games with different rules—she is certainly a confessional, and one in the terms Hodges … Read more

A Breakthrough to Save Humanity

In Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy (1320) we encounter a forlorn Ulysses (Greek, Odysseus) in the Inferno, punished to eternal torments for deceitful stratagems in the Trojan war, and beyond. Dante adds a layer to the Classical myth, where the aged warrior returns to his native Ithaca only to find: not sweetness of a son, … Read more