A Visit To Our Sister’s: A Brief Tour of the French Poetic Sublime
- Elijah Perseus Blumov
- Jun 29
- 19 min read
Updated: Jul 2
Elijah Perseus Blumov
Tell me, reader–how many works of French literature have you read in your life? Since you have bothered to begin this article (and I thank you for it), I might hazard that your count is higher than most. And yet, were I to ask: “How many full-length books of French poetry have you read in your life?” I would assume that, even among my esteemed Francophile readership, that number would plummet.
When it comes to the American consumption of French prose, the situation is not great, but neither is it utterly grim: many read Voltaire and Camus in high school, and many also read some Montaigne, Rousseau, Montesquieu, or Tocqueville in college; the gibbering specters of Foucault, Derrida, Barthes, and Baudrillard seem to always already haunt the graduate schools; your average homo literatus has read and admired Madame Bovary, dabbled in Balzac or Zola, and had a (usually shamefully brief) dalliance with Proust; when I worked as a bookseller, I would occasionally have the pleasure of directing intrepid youths to their first doorstopper Hugo or Dumas; all is not lost.
Yet what of French poets? When Americans read them at all, they tend to follow the Jim Morrison/Patti Smith route and go for poètes maudits like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and sometimes Verlaine (Blake is also always part of this equation for some reason). These poets have their merits, of course; yet the ought-to-be-obvious fact that French poetry has far more to offer than spleen, absinthe, bad-boy Catholicism, and dying in middle age is not a truism of which I am convinced most poetry-reading Americans are truly aware (I would never, of course, include you in this sweeping generalization, dear reader).
One major reason I am not convinced is because, while Baudelaire seems to get a new translation every couple years or so, time and again when I have sought out English translations of solidly canonical French poetry, I have come up miserably, bewilderingly short. Alfred de Musset’s Lorenzaccio, often considered the greatest French play of the 19th century, is available in its entirety only (to my knowledge) in one Edwardian translation; the vast majority of the poems of Leconte de Lisle, the founder of the incredibly influential Parnassian movement, or Alfred de Vigny, a prominent Romantic poet, have never received published English translations. Searching for poetic, non-scholarly translations from the last hundred years of landmark neoclassical tragedies like Horace, Polyeucte, Bajazet, or Mithridate? Hell, anything by Robert Garnier? Good luck. One could go on. For the would-be reader of French poetry who has no French, the situation is frustrating; for the would-be translator, it presents an astonishingly untouched frontier.
“But why,” you may reasonably ask, “are you clutching your pearls about French poetry in particular? Surely, compared to the poetry of most other languages, French poetry has received a good amount of attention from English translators.” Well, reader, you have a good point: the overall state of poetic translation is scarily inadequate. Joost van den Vondel is usually considered the greatest Dutch poet of all time, and only one of his works, Lucifer, seems to ever be (occasionally) translated. And when was the last time German translators closed their nth Englishing of Rilke and opened their Klopstock? Outside of the European canons, of course, the situation is even more egregious. Lord knows there are probably masterpieces in Tagalog, Urdu, and Amharic that we have never even heard of.
However, if the heroic project to translate international poetry into English ought to excel anywhere, it ought to be in French. France, after all, has been England’s direct neighbor and great frenemy since the two civilizations emerged. They practically grew up together, mixing bloodlines and trading fashions and ideas for many hundreds of years. To understand one culture, you must understand the other. The English language itself is a twining of two tongues (a French kiss, if you will), Anglo-Saxon and Norman French, and, from Chaucer onward, French poetry has had an incalculable effect on the development of English poetry. Borrowings and transformations of French diction, prosody, forms, aesthetic trends, and even the very use of rhyme itself, have made modern English poetry what it is. To study English poetry while remaining ignorant of French poetry is like studying the properties of bronze without understanding the properties of copper– the former is unimaginable without the latter. For anyone who speaks and writes in English, France is our beautiful twin sister, and we therefore ought to spend some time with her, her culture, and her literary productions.
Ideally, learning French would be a requirement of Anglophone education (as, in the 18th and 19th centuries, among the elite, it practically was). Unfortunately, doing so is not in the cards for most of us, which is why translation is so important. However, if the corpus of French poetry available in English is unsatisfactory, we cannot blame our hardworking translators–we can only blame ourselves. After all, if the demand for French poetry among English speakers were higher, we would get all the translations we could ask for. Writers and publishers want to sell books, after all.
Walt Whitman, a man I rarely agree with, once said: “To have great poets, there must be great audiences too.” I find this too fatalistic and reductive (where were Blake’s, Dickinson’s, and Hopkins’s great audiences?) but there is a crucial grain of truth in it: great periods of artistic production do tend to occur when audiences are discerning of and willing to reward great work. If we desire a greater quantity of high-quality literary efforts, whether in poetry, novels, or translation, we must develop our tastes and vote with our wallets accordingly.
In this essay, I hope to give you a taste of the richness and range of French poetry, and introduce you to some famous but underread masterpieces which you may have heard of, but perhaps have never had the chance to read. My goal is not only to share with you some deeply interesting and important works of literature, but to help us all become a better, more informed audience– an audience that demands and deserves the best that not only our own literature but the literatures of the world have to offer. Over time, the more we seek out the great poetry of our neighbors, the more of it will be available for us to find.
Rather than attempt to give you a proper survey of French literature as a whole–a herculean task which would be well beyond my scope here– I will confine myself to taking you through a few of my own personal highlights from across the ages. Because of my own predilections, these highlights will have an overarching theme: they all attempt to conjure an overwhelming feeling of impersonal grandeur, that transcendent synthesis of awe and terror known as the sublime. As we shall see, the sublime comes in different flavors, and French poets have confected many of them.
For mysterious reasons which I do not have the luxury to fully investigate, the French character has long been singularly attracted to metaphysical horror and the depths of human depravity (a tendency they somewhat passed on to their cultural children, the Russians). The first existentialist was Blaise Pascal, who said, in his 17th century Pensées:
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
The idyllic beauty and refined elegance of sunny France contrasted with the dark souls and brutal bluntness (what we call frankness) of many of its inhabitants and produces an uncanny effect which I and many others have long found deeply intriguing. The stereotypically French blackness of vision has drawn many readers to the likes of Sade, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Céline, and Sartre, but, as I hope to show you, the existential Gallic sensibility and taste for the sublime has taken many other (often complementary) forms as well. What seems consistent in the French spirit is an uncompromising, extravagant fierceness of conviction and a cold-blooded will to clarity which often leaves the mild-mannered, sentimental, common-sense Anglophone reader slightly baffled, simultaneously skeptical and impressed.
And now, dear reader, I would like you to envision yourself in Paris. About an hour ago, you awoke slowly from your sunlit sheets, moseyed over to your local patisserie, and savored a steaming café au lait with a crusty, buttery, chocolate-oozing pain suisse. Now, we are in a small but cozy boat on the glittering Seine, and we are about to take a voyage– a voyage to see our sister, our soeur, our ravishing twin, French literature.
The Song of Roland: The Masculine Sublime
As we turn the first corner, a colossal gray citadel looms into view. Thick walls of granite thrust aloft Romanesque colonnades and foliated cloisters, the stony shadows broken only by shimmering flashes of gem-like stained glass. Warlike yet contemplative, austere and stern but with a sensuous heart, this is our first sight: France’s national epic, and first extant poem, La Chanson de Roland.
Composed sometime in the 11th century (supposedly by a bard named Turold), The Song of Roland is, like all epics, a mythic glorification of an even more ancient past–in this case, the court of Charlemagne in the 8th century. It is the foremost example of the genre known as chansons de gestes (“songs of great deeds”), which all deal with the so-called “Matter of France:” tales of Frankish military valor, particularly those concerned with Charlemagne and his paladins. To those of us who are more familiar with later Medieval literature, replete with courtly romance, fantastical episodes, and pious allegories, Roland appears refreshingly, shockingly archaic: to an even greater degree than Beowulf, it retains the enchanting repetitive formulae and continuous action of oral poetry, and rings with a true Homeric note. Stylistically, however, it is entirely its own beast, and possesses, to my mind, one of the most striking voices in poetry.
While Roland is less gory than the Iliad, it somehow comes across as even more relentlessly masculine. Homer is given to eloquent flights of figuration and portraits of pathos; Turold, by contrast, is a master of the blunt, brutal statement. Roland translator Frederick Goldin writes in his introduction:
“Every reader of The Song of Roland is stuck by its distinctive and unforgettable style: the flat declarativeness of its lines, the dizzying shifts in tense…. the thinness of its vocabulary (consisting of fewer than 1800 words) and the rare use of figurative language, the powerful conclusiveness of each laisse [stanza] which gives one the feeling that the narrative repeatedly comes to an end and then resumes.”
I would note here that Turold’s use of a spare vocabulary to brilliant effect is the first example of a characteristic that has come to be a defining glory of French literature. Whereas English is like a cavern filled with a dragon’s hoard of words from different places and times, and our writing thrives on the unparalleled richness of our diction, French is like a jewel box containing only a modest selection of precious stones, each of which gains in value with usage and time. In French, each word resonates with familiarity and association, and artfulness lies less in verbal variety than verbal arrangement. In some of the best French authors, utterly common words like eyes (yeux) or blue (azure) may gain, from tasteful repeated use, a symbolic potency.
For an example of Roland’s style (if not its versification) we may take its opening stanza (in Goldin’s loosely metrical translation):
Charles the King, our Emperor, the Great,
has been in Spain for seven full years,
has conquered the high land down to the sea.
There is no castle that stands against him now,
no wall, no citadel left to break down–
except Saragossa, high on a mountain.
King Marsilion holds it, who does not love God,
who serves Mahumet and prays to Apollin.
He cannot save himself: his ruin will find him there. AOI.
Later, in the battle scenes, we have passages such as this (laisse 96):
And Gerin strikes Malprimis of Brigal,
who finds his good shield now not worth one cent;
shatters the precious boss of pure crystal,
knocks the whole half of it down to the ground;
burst through the hauberk’s rings into the flesh,
buries his good lance deep in his body;
the pagan falls, all his sinews one mass,
down to the ground. Satan takes away his soul. AOI.
And this–awesome in its sensuous, violent swagger (laisse 104):
The battle is fearful and wonderful
and everywhere. Roland never spares himself,
strikes with his lance as long as the wood lasts;
the fifteenth blow he struck, it broke, was lost.
Then he draws Durendal, his good sword, bare,
and spurs his horse, comes on to strike Chernuble,
smashes his helmet, carbuncles shed their light,
cuts through the coif, through the hair on his head,
cut through his eyes, through his face, through that look,
the bright, shining hauberk with its fine rings,
down through the trunk to the fork of his legs,
through the saddle, adorned with beaten gold,
into the horse; and the sword came to rest:
cut through the spine, never felt for the joint;
knocks him down, dead, on the rich grass of the meadow;
then said to him: “You were doomed when you started,
Clown! Nobody! Let Mahum help you now.
No pagan swine will win the field this day.”
This ultimate negation of a human being–telling them that they are “nobody” as they are dying–occurs multiple times in Roland, and is one of its most brutal, striking features; in historical retrospect, it feels quintessentially French.
Brutality aside, it is perhaps worth saying here that to protest against Roland’s “anti-Muslim” sentiment would be willfully obtuse. Not only does the 11th century poem assume as a matter of course the metaphysical correctness of Christianity (in Roland, the grace of God is practically a military weapon), but also, if it was not apparent already, Turold had no actual understanding of Islam– his Saracens are simply idol-worshipping pagans, many of whom, it is made clear, would nevertheless be deemed good and valiant men if they did not happen to be religiously in the wrong (Tasso makes the same poignant observation in his crusader epic, Gerusalemme Liberata). One of the values of Roland is that it allows us to imaginatively entertain an alien, pre-modern perspective, sure of the universality and permanence of its values and the reality of providence. The meaning of “AOI,” which appears at the conclusion of many stanzas in Roland, remains a mystery (it might indicate for a certain musical action to occur during oral performance). I, however, cannot help but think of it as a kind of understated whoop or war cry (Ah-wa) uttered after something particularly cool has been said.
The plot of Roland is easily told. Marsilion, the last Muslim king remaining in Spain after Charlemagne’s victories, offers that he and his followers will convert to Christianity and accompany Charlemagne back to France in exchange for peace. Roland, Charlemagne’s finest warrior, volunteers as emissary to negotiate the peace, but Charlemagne rejects him as being too valuable to risk for such a mission. Roland, therefore, volunteers his uncle, Ganelon. Ganelon accepts, but is furious that Roland has proffered him up for such a perilous task. Seeking revenge, he advises Marsilion to attack Charlemagne’s vulnerable rearguard on the way back to France. He then volunteers Roland to lead this contingent, which Roland accepts. Sure enough, the Saracens ambush the Frankish rearguard as they make their way through the treacherous Pyrenees. Oliver, Roland’s best friend, begs him to call for aid, but Roland refuses, insisting that to do so would be a slight to his honor. Only at the last moment, as the last of his men are dying, does Roland blow his horn, alerting Charlemagne of the betrayal. He blows with such force that he bursts his temples and eventually dies.
Charlemagne returns and slaughters the host of Marsilion, as well as the huge Saracen army of Baligant, who have come as reinforcements. The Frankish forces then return to Aix-la-Chapelle, where Ganelon is put on trial for treason. Ganelon argues that he acted out of justifiable revenge, not treachery, and the matter is put to a trial by combat. Ganelon’s mighty champion Pinabel is defeated by the unassuming Thierry, and this is seen as proof of Ganelon’s guilt. Ganelon is sentenced to be torn apart by horses, and the tale ends with the ancient Charlemagne sorrowfully accepting yet another call to go to war.
This melancholic conclusion highlighting the cyclical nature of violence hints that, like the Iliad, the literary soil from which Greek tragedy bloomed, Roland is not merely a bloodthirsty, action-packed war story, but an epic streaked with tragic consciousness. In Roland and Ganelon we have two figures who, in themselves, are merely hotheaded warriors who fall victim to their pride and wrath, respectively; yet in the context of divine providence, their flaws take on fatalistic, tragic dimensions and acquire the quality of felices culpae. It is cosmically necessary that Roland refuse to call for aid, because it is only through his death that Charlemagne gains the motivation to utterly destroy both Saracen hosts, thus liberating Spain from infidel rule. The betrayal of Ganelon of course was also, in turn, critical to this reconquista. Though we may not share the view that a Christian Spain is necessarily a better Spain, the poem compels us to entertain the profound idea that human sinfulness may itself be an instrument of the divine will, and that our flaws and mistakes, so ruinous to ourselves, are predetermined cogs in the divine machinery.
The betrayal of Ganelon serves another higher function as well. Like the Eumenides of Aeschylus, Roland ends with a trial scene which exposes an untenable contradiction in the current system of values and necessitates the creation of a new order. Ganelon’s claim that he was justified in taking revenge pits his rights as a feudal lord against his obligation to uphold the interests of his king, Charlemagne. As in the Eumenides, the verdict is decided by divine intervention: God condemns Ganelon, and thereby establishes Charlemagne as absolute ruler by heavenly mandate, paving the way for this Frankish king to become the first Holy Roman Emperor. Roland is thus the first in a long line of French literary works to defend virtuous tyranny. Many centuries later, in the reign of the Sun King, works by Corneille and others would do the same. It is to that magnificent, equally extreme world that we shall now turn.
Phaedra: The Passionate Sublime
In the interest of time, our barque must skim past many stunning edifices: the great romances and troubadour songs which helped make France the artistic flower of the late Middle Ages; the grandiloquent Protestant epics of D’Aubigné and Du Bartas, so influential on John Milton and Puritan America; that stunning synthesis of earthy rakishness and fiery neoplatonism one finds in Ronsard and other lyricists of the Parisian and Lyonnaise Renaissance– yet look: rising above us, a symmetrical spectacle of gleaming Grecian marble. Smooth, veined, and deathly white, it is a pillared temple, enthralling in its simplicity. Balanced in a state of poised restraint, the stones seem to shiver with intensity. With a shock, you notice crimson rivulets of blood slowly oozing down the immaculate fluted columns. We have arrived at Neoclassical tragedy.
The Anglophone reader who engages with the great French drama of the 17th century will inevitably succumb to the temptation to make comparisons with Shakespeare. The temptation of the Francophone reader of Shakespeare to make the same comparisons is likewise irresistible. Historically, such comparisons have often led to mutual bewilderment and intolerance– too often, English speakers have found the French playwrights stilted, stuffy, and pompous, and French speakers have found Shakespeare crude, undisciplined, and outlandish. Such knee-jerk reactions are unfortunate, but comparing national literatures can also be a fascinating and fruitful enterprise: place the great French and English dramatic poets side by side, and you will find the limitations and strengths of both vividly illuminated. It is easy, for one raised on Shakespearean bardolatry, to assume that our Will, at least at his best, represents the perfection of the poetic drama. Encounter Racine, however, and you will have to contend with a completely different vision of perfection. The Shakespearean drama is a universe unto itself: filled with occasions for both laughter and tears, brimming with charming, complex characters, and soaring with imaginative language; the Racinian drama is a well-oiled machine of doom, efficient and relentless, capable of heating the claustrophobic crucible of the drawing-room stage to an emotional temperature almost unbearable. These two visions produce two different kinds of experiences, both magnificent. How can we say one is inherently superior to the other?
When one wishes to praise the French drama at the expense of the English, the single-minded concentration, purity, and craftsmanship of the French plot is always the first thing mentioned– Aristotle’s unity of action. By contrast, the French fetishization of the pseudo-Aristotelian unity of time (the plot must take place within 24 hours), and unity of place (the plot must take place within one location) has been ridiculed as unnecessarily (even fatally) limiting. Now, while it is certainly true that any attempt to justify the unities of time and place by an appeal to either Aristotle or to vraisemblance (ex. the argument that dramatic leaps in space or time are too unrealistic for the audience to credit) is absurd, it is also true that adherence to the unities of time and place not only assisted French playwrights in maintaining the desirable unity of action, but played a crucial role in producing the singular concentration and intensity for which French drama is known. Moreover, in the hands of a master like Racine, even draconian constraints become strengths: unable to whisk his characters through space and time, he alludes to other places and times through his dialogue, allowing the imaginations of the audience to create far vaster spatio-temporal vistas than he would be able to crudely conjure on the stage. In the world of French drama, the scene of the action is not simply one arbitrary option among several– it is the fateful point of confluence where past events and far-off forces culminate in a shattering cataclysm.
If we look specifically at tragedy, we find another Gallic strength: namely, a greater understanding than the English of what tragedy actually is. It was doubtless a productive and innovative misprision for Shakespeare and his ilk to interpret Aristotle’s hamartia as a mortal vice rather than an error of judgment, but this approach can often sabotage the creation of a legitimately tragic effect. King Lear and Othello are magnificent inventions, but both, at least to this reader, fail to produce sufficient pity for their rash and idiotic protagonists to succeed as tragedies, even if they are extremely powerful in other ways. Hamlet acts inexplicably; Macbeth gets his just deserts; the selfish folly of Antony leads to hundreds of avoidable deaths (and, indirectly, the advent of centuries of totalitarianism). We may be dazzled by these characters, but if there is tragedy at all, it is only in witnessing such grand–in some ways noble– personalities suffer such delusion and degradation (what A.C. Bradley called their “waste”). In a word, tragedies are less tragic when they are blatantly avoidable. Exasperation is the death of pity, and terror becomes “I told you so.”
The French tragedies of Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) and Jean Racine (1639-1699), so different from one another, are united in having refreshingly self-aware protagonists who acknowledge the authority of reason. The Cornelian hero, like the Sophoclean hero, is a figure of fierce virtue and integrity who is forced, due to circumstance, to either suffer for adhering to their ideals or make an agonizing choice between two rival obligations. The Racinian hero (usually heroine), is typically the victim of an unasked-for, uncontrollable passion, and yet, is lucid enough to acknowledge both that their passion is irrational and destructive and that they are helpless before it. In both Corneille and Racine, as in the Greek theatre, we are shown the degree to which humans are powerless over their lives, and how the use of reason, noble and necessary as it is, is unable to prevent suffering or overthrow our fate.
Unlike Greek tragedies however, which often conclude with a movement toward a transcendent synthesis of previously conflicting forces or an injunction to moderation, the tragedies of Racine are breakneck trainwrecks of emotional ruination sans salvation, and that is why they may strike us as thrillingly modern. A Jansenist (like Pascal) convinced of the utter depravity of the human soul, Racine offers us a vision of the human being as a wretched plaything of their own heredity and brain chemistry, anticipating (and influencing) both Naturalism and Existentialism. Racine also innovates by bringing the madness and torture of lovesickness, which had been briefly touched on by Euripides and developed by Apollonius and Virgil, fully into the realm of tragedy. Nowhere are all these elements more evident than in Racine’s 1677 masterpiece, Phèdre.
Racine’s ingenious adaptation of Euripides’s Hippolytus (and, to a large extent, Seneca’s Phaedra), concerns the eponymous queen’s forbidden, incestuous love for her stepson, Hippolytus. She describes her infatuation in pathological terms reminiscent of Sappho (here in Richard Wilbur’s translation):
I stared, I blushed, I paled, beholding him;
a sudden turmoil set my mind aswim;
my eyes no longer saw, my lips were dumb;
my body burned, and yet was cold and numb.
I knew myself possessed by Venus, whose
fierce flames torment the quarry she pursues.
Wilbur’s heroic couplets substitute for Racine’s inimitably graceful alexandrine couplets, whose balance and restraint crackle with the passion burning beneath them, and whose hemistichs enact the conflict of thesis and antithesis.
After receiving false word of the death of her husband, Theseus, Phaedra dares to confess her love to Hippolytus, who is rendered speechless with horror. Crazed with shame, the queen bears her breast to him and, in a perverse reversal of Clytemnestra’s maternal plea to Orestes in Libation Bearers, begs her “son” to stab her in the heart:
No, such a monster is too vile to spare.
Here is my heart. Your blade must pierce me there.
In haste to expiate its wicked lust,
my heart already leaps to meet your thrust.
Strike, then. Or if your hatred and disdain
refuse me such a blow, so sweet a pain,
if you’ll not stain your hand with my abhorred
and tainted blood, lend me at least your sword.
Give it to me!
The shocking eroticism of this passage, a delirious cocktail of debasement, fury, lust, and death, may be considered the primal scene of all subsequent French literature.
Hippolytus abandons his sword and flees from this spectacle, and from there, matters only get worse. Theseus, as it turns out, is not dead, and soon returns. Desperate to conceal her mistresses’ guilt, Phaedra’s confidante, Oenone, tells Theseus that Hippolytus attempted to force himself on Phaedra, and points to the prince’s abandoned sword as proof. Furious, Theseus banishes Hippolytus, who refuses to reveal the truth, and petitions Neptune to smite him. Phaedra, herself smitten with guilt, is on the brink of telling Theseus the truth, but holds back once she learns that Hippolytus was in love with the young Aricia. Consumed by jealous rage, she leaves Hippolytus to his doom, insists that Aricia must also die, and schemes to have Theseus execute her. Yet even as she plots, she is disgusted and shocked by herself:
In my wild jealousy I will plead with him.
I’ll what? Has my poor reason grown so dim?
I, jealous! And it’s with Theseus I would plead!
My husband lives, and still my passions feed
on whom? Toward whom do all my wishes tend?
At every word, my hair stands up on end.
The measure of my crimes is now replete.
I foul the air with incest and deceit.
My murderous hands are itching to be stained
with innocent blood, that vengeance be obtained.
Wretch that I am, how can I live, how face
the sacred Sun, great elder of my race?
This is the Racinian state of helpless lucidity, the moral-rational mind horrified at its own weakness and monstrosity.
After speaking to Aricia, Theseus begins to nurse doubts about his son’s guilt, and regrets his hasty curse. Of course, it is too little too late: Theramenes, Hippolytus’s attendant, arrives to announce that Hippolytus, in fighting off Neptune’s monster from the sea, has been thrown from his chariot and killed. The messenger speech of Theramenes describing the death of Hippolytus is, simply put, one of the pinnacles of French literature. It is too long to share here–I leave you to seek it out yourself. The play concludes with Phaedra serenely confessing to her husband before dying of poison, and Theseus, distraught, adopting Aricia as his new daughter. Knowing the lustful Theseus, one suspects it is only a matter of time before Aricia feels his own sword upon her.
Part Two is forthcoming in our next issue.
This essay was solicited by our George Steiner Editor of Poetry and Criticism, Amit Majmudar.
Elijah Perseus Blumov is a poet, citicic, and the host of the poetry analysis podcast, Versecraft. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming from periodicals such as Literary Matters, Birmingham Poetry Review, Think Journal, The Alabama Literary Review, and The Classical Outlook.
