The difference between popular fiction and literary fiction is subtle yet unmistakable.

The criteria is graded — think of it as running along a kind of continuum or spectrum — so that a book or movie can have elements of both literary fiction and also elements of commercial-genre fiction at the same time. But there is a distinction.

It is not the case that plotting is the determining characteristic. In fact, some of the best plots in all the world’s literature are to be found in literary fiction — I’m thinking specifically of Les Miserables, Ninety-Three, and especially The Possessed…

“Life is an unceasing sequence of single actions,” wrote Ludwig von Mises, “but the single action is by no means isolated.”

So, in many ways, is plot.

But, unlike life, plot is selective — which means among other things that the author is the selector: the author chooses the actions her or his characters undertake.

This, incidentally, is one of the primary ways in which fiction differs from journalism or chronicle, and it’s why “the pressure to record,” as the excellent poet Thom Gunn once described it, is not — contrary to what you may have heard — the primary…

Spring

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring –
When weeds, in wheels, shoot long and lovely and lush;
Thrush’s eggs look little low heavens, and thrush
Through the echoing timber does so rinse and wring
The ear, it strikes like lightnings to hear him sing;
The glassy peartree leaves and blooms, they brush
The descending blue; that blue is all in a rush
With richness; the racing lambs too have fair their fling.

What is all this juice and all this joy? A strain of the earth’s sweet being in the beginning In Eden garden. — Have, get, before it…

“To produce a mighty book you must choose a mighty theme,” wrote Herman Melville, and what he says is true — true of any and all art: mighty themes are one of the distinguishing characteristics of timeless art. What is theme? Theme is the meaning that the components of your story or artwork add up to.

In literature, not all stories necessarily have a theme — and these are the stories that time so frequently sinks.

Soap operas, for example, which possess plenty of plot, usually have no theme to speak of.

Some of the great books in world literature…

This happened shortly after his mother died, when he was seventeen-years-old and the real violence had not yet begun. The day after her death, he dropped out of high school and went to live with his half brother, whom he’d only met once, eight years before.

His half brother’s name was Jon. He lived in a shotgun shack between Nogales and Tucson, at the end of a sandy road immediately beyond which rose the Baboquivari Mountains. In the opposite direction, in the middle distance, there was saguaro and candlewood and a desert as wide and windy as the sea. …

First, there’s a general idiom to the language of poetry — whether written, spoken, or both — and by “idiom” I mean a mode of expression or a distinctive character and excellence of language.

Second, there is within the general idiom a more specific idiom to each era or phase.

Third, there’s the idiom of each individual person and pen and her or his specific ways and modes and methods — methods of thought, I mean to say.

The writer who does not learn the first of these three goes without good navigation and may be headed for a shipwreck…

Answer quickly, yes or no: is the following a poem — and I do mean exactly as it appears in the form I’ve transcribed it below?

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought, I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, and with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, for precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, and weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe, and moan the expense of many a vanished sight. Then can I grieve at…

I once knew a girl named Poetry. Everyone called her Poe. Everyone except me. I called her Poetry.

I asked Poetry one day if she knew the meaning of her name, and she said yes: to make, she said, and she was right. The word “poem,” from the Greek poiein, means exactly that: “to create, to craft, to make.”

Like all other artistic works, poems are created things — crafted things — and poets are for this reason creators, pure and simple. (Prose literally defined means “straightforward” — from the Latin prosa, proversus: “turned to face forward.”) …