Essays

  • A Passionate Pilgrimage

    Conference Paper, 20th Century Literature Conference – University of Louisville – 1990

    As dedicated and occasionally as inspiring a poet as Russia’s Anna Akhmatova or this country’s Louise Bogan, is Argentina’s Alfonsina Storni who has been overlooked by English speaking translators and critics. The dynamics of male/female tensions are keenly evident in Stornie’s poems.

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    Yeats Essay

    Published in Verse-Virtual November 2024 https://www.verse-virtual.org/2024/November/henning-dianna-mackinnon-essay-2024-november.html In an unpublished lecture on “Modern Ireland,” Yeats wrote: “And style, whether of life or literature, comes, I think, from excess, from something over and above utility which wrings the heart.” Yeast’s proclivity for writing poetry was derived from his obsessive concern with time, with how quickly it catapults…

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    Once There Was Light

    Once There Was Light, A study on Jane Kenyon ONCE THERE WAS LIGHT https://www.verse-virtual.org/2025/September/henning-dianna-mackinnon-essay-2025-september.html Like Russia’s Anna Akhmatova, whom Jane Kenyon translated in 1985 with Vera Sandomirsky Dunham, Jane Kenyon employs images that create emotional pressure, that are told with such accuracy that the reader becomes witness to what Kenyon herself has observed. Jane Kenyon…

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    Musical Strings

    Musical Strings: Essay on Yeats, By Dianna Henning Published in Psychological Perspectives, issue Thirty-One, 1995, (under a different title of : A Sudden Flaming Word)               In an unpublished lecture on “Modern Ireland,” Yeats wrote: “And style, whether of life or literature, comes, I think, from excess, from something over and above utility which…