No program can say what another will do.
Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you:
I will prove that although you might work til you drop,
you can’t predict whether a program will stop.

Launched on April 1, 2009, Poems Out Loud is a place for poetry. The site features columns and recorded readings by well-known and award-winning poets as well as general poetry news and ephemera.

Denton Fox writes in his 1987 edition of The Poems, "Henryson belongs firmly to the middle ages, not to the Renaissance." Yet he belongs also in the eternal present of the wholly imagined and the perfectly pitched, a poet whose constant awareness of the world's hardness and injustice is mitigated by his irony, tender-heartedness, and ever-ready sense of humour.

Most important of all, however, is Henryson's "sound of sense". His voice is finely tuned to the verse forms, can modulate from insinuation to instruction, from high-toned earnestness to wily familiarity - and it was this sensation of intimacy with a speaker at once sober and playful that inspired me to begin putting the not very difficult Scots language of his originals into rhymed stanzas of more immediately accessible English.

Unfortunately, many Christians have allowed themselves to become so estranged from contemporary culture that they have essentially given up any hope of influencing the artists who will create the visual images, stories, and music that shape our time.

Few Christians have applied the concept of "stewardship" to culture itself. While it has been natural for Christians to see themselves as stewards of natural resources, or wealth, or the institutional church, there has been little sense of stewardship over our national culture.

Image speaks with equal force and relevance to the secular culture and to the church. By finding fresh ways for the imagination to embody religious truth and religious experience, Image challenges believers and nonbelievers alike.

Milton had carried his epic around inside him for many years, and any number of calamities—including the outbreak of bubonic plague from 1664 to 1665, which killed seventy-five thousand Londoners—might have prevented him from getting it all down on paper. Its very completion must have seemed like divine Providence to Milton. Even while writing it, he believed that he shared a muse with Moses and King David and that she visited him nightly in his dreams; he woke up and dictated his poem in seemingly preformed stanzas. The palpable exhilaration of the poem’s composition, and the heavy burden of its complex meanings, contributes to the thrilling tension of “Paradise Lost.”

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