John Keats, poetry, and the romance of a short life –On burning brightly and finding artistic validation in death It’s time to revel in some early 19th century English romance with the poster boy of tragedy and posthumous artistic validation.  John Keats, the bright star, was the very personification of a young romantic. He was everything...

Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry, poverty, and a Pulitzer prize What Brooks taught the world about the beauty of community and being a black woman in America Gwendolyn Brooks is an earthy, plainspoken, unpretentious American legend. She won countless awards including a Pulitzer prize and is known around the globe as Chicago’s First Lady of Poetry. She is a...

Oscar Wilde: Poetry and aesthetics Take a closer look at the Irish playwright’s life and the fashionable, indulgent myth he built up around himself

Episode 4 is a real treat because we’re discussing a feminist icon, a Mexican legend, a religious prodigy, and one of the most loved female poets in recent history.  In her lifetime, Juana Ines de la Cruz wrote several plays, poems, and essays. Two volumes of works were published while she was alive. The last...

When most people hear Beat Generation, a few big names rise to the surface of their brains. Kerouac, Ginsberg, Corso. But one name sometimes gets buried behind the scenes: Lawrence Ferlinghetti. If you ask him, Ferlinghetti says that he was never a Beat poet. Yet that was the world in which he immersed himself, as...

Rainer Maria Rilke is a poet who is beloved and celebrated for his work by artists everywhere. Better known for an inspiring collection of letters than he is for his own poetry, Rilke is a compelling personality and truly a product of a different time. Let’s get to know Rilke and the world in which...

On this, the inaugural episode of the tiff loves words podcast, we dive into a piece by America’s transcendentalist darling, Walt Whitman. To understand the emotion behind these words, we must first understand the time in which they were written and the fascinating man behind the pen. What makes Walt Whitman’s “To a Stranger” so...