Famous poets (tortured or not) have taken inspiration from Swift’s music. Can you match the poem to the song? By Jennifer Harlan Taylor Swift is many things: a pop superstar, a business mogul, a cat ...

The ghazal is a formal poem that has roots in seventh-century Arabia and was often sung by musicians. The poet Agha Shahid Ali introduced the form to America. “Ghazal” literally means “the cry of a ...

One of Blake’s opposition-pairings evokes the children of the poorhouses coming to St. Paul’s Cathedral at London as flowers or lambs, their singing of Holy Week hymns rising to heaven. In 1789, ...

Luke Savage | Author, The Dead Center: Reflections on Liberalism and Democracy After the End of History Song-sharking companies sometimes began by offering free consultations for everyday poets—as in ...

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021. Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Song and Story,” from our May 1992 issue, begins ...

To her early 20th-century audience, Tsilye Dropkin’s Yiddish poetry was as shocking for its content as its form. A Russian-born poet who immigrated to New York City at the age of 25, Dropkin broke ...