Ange Mlinko

If modernism is our antiquity, as T.J. Clark has claimed, then Barbara Guest was a devout classicist. No American poet – with the exception of John Ashbery – so reverently extended early modernist aesthetics into the second half of the 20th century. As Guest put it in her essay ‘Radical Poetics and Conservative Poetry’, ‘everything we loved, emulated, was...

We went to the vivarium – to see the tropical butterflies in a walk-through biodome. They were cocooning, their insides filled with meconium. The cocoons looked like jade and rosy quartz pendants for ladies’ ears – with gold worked in, something Babylonian. Enormous specimens breathed against treebark.

Belated naturalists we. I kept repeating to myself: the...

Robert Oppenheimer knew Sanskrit. Quotations from the Bhagavad Gita flashed through his mind when he witnessed the first atomic explosion in New Mexico in 1945: ‘Suppose a thousand suns should rise together into the sky: such is the glory of the Shape of the Infinite God.’ Reading that same chapter of the Bhagavad Gita in Darjeeling in 1962, Allen Ginsberg thought of something...