Thwack. Thwack. Thwack. Thwp. Thwp. Thwack. The sound of stone striking wood. Rustling leaves. A loud crack as a tree falls. A dry whirring of insects. Further off, a monkey shrieks. Shhpt. Shhpt. Water purls over stones in a brook; the heavy pi…

  At noon on February 21, 1773, as the Antarctic sun glittered on the decks of the HMS Resolution, a cry of “land” ricocheted through the tiny world of wood, water, and ice. Captain James Cook examined the slate-gray smudge on the southern hor…

A vision of Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” at its centenary.When “Sunday Morning” was first published in the November 1915 issue of Poetry, just over a hundred years ago, Wallace Stevens was thirty-six; the poem was one of his first major publica…