Dark portents of civil war were looming at the very time Walt Whitman celebrated the transformative song of empathy. “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels,” he wrote in his 1855 book Leaves of Grass, “I myself become the wounded person.” The ensuing battle over slavery, an institution that Charles Darwin called “the greatest curse on Earth,” would seem an unlikely place to find hope in ...

al-jawahiri, one of the most illustrious contemporary classical poets of iraq, was born in the holy city of najaf to a cultured, scholarly, and cultivated family. the scientific and cultural environment of najaf, the literary and scientific richness of his familial atmosphere, and al-jawahiri’s poetic taste and talent caused him to turn to his predecessor poets’ works, especially the ones from ...