BBC Radio 4: In Our Time: 'Literary Modernism'

Here is an interesting discussion on Modernism, on the flagship BBC radio 4 cultural programme In Our Time, with the legendary Melvyn Bragg and guests.  Click on the link below, sit back, and enjoy!

 BBC Radio 4: In Our Time, with Melvyn Bragg:

 "The literary movement that embraced Joyce, DH Lawrence, TS Eliot, Virginia Woolf and many others in the early decades of the twentieth century. Modernism claimed to be revolutionary, and has been accused of being wilfully obscure. Some modernist writers campaigned for the rites of working women, others embraced fascism. What were the movement's defining features, and do the questions that exercised the genre at the start of the twentieth century have relevance to us at the beginning of the twenty-first?"

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/p00547fv

William Blake and the art of engraving

 William Blake is one of England's greatest poets and artists, perhaps the greatest poet-artist of all. His vision shines through his verse and his extraordinary engravings. He was an artisan, working from home with his own printing press, producing unique prints, and while doing so, enjoying complete freedom, and bypassing any threat of censorship. I am a member of the William Blake Society which is organising an event: A Blake Printing Workshop with Michael Phillipps. This contemporary artist has spent a good part of his career studying how Blake used copper plates to engrave and print. He would apply an acid-resistant substance to them, and then let the acid eat around the rest, leaving his artwork to 'stand out', ready for him to apply his range of colours, and then put the paper through the rollers, pressing it on to the copper surface. 

Here is a short video in which Michael Phillipps demonstrates something of Blake's extraordinary creativity:

http://www.williamblakeprints.co.uk/

The peals

 This has got me thinking about the word 'to peal'. It sounds like a sound! And it turns out it comes from the French, like so many of our words. It is the shortened form of 'appeal' from the French 'appel', so 'a call'. So when bells peal out, we are being called. Not necessarily to church, but something in us is clearly, subtly, being called to, or being called out of us. 

Middle English pele also had the sense of "an accusation, an appeal" (15c.), and apele for "a ringing of bells" is attested from mid-15c.

Extended sense of "loud ringing of bells" is first recorded 1510s; subsequently it was transferred to other successions of loud sounds (thunder, cannon, mass shouts or laughter). Meaning "set of bells tuned to one another" is by 1789.

                                                                 (Online Etymological Dictionary)

So, you get the collocations 'a peal of thunder', 'peals of laughter'. And many others. 

In Macbeth, Shakespeare brings out the sinister connotations of the word:

Ere the bat hath flown
His cloister’d flight, ere, to black Hecate’s summons
The shard-borne beetle with his drowsy hums
Hath rung night’s yawning peal, there shall be done
A deed of dreadful note.

(Act III, scene 2)

The metaphor 'rung night's yawning peal' is striking. It is not the peal of bells summoning to worship, or celebrating a wedding, or even marking somone's passing. It sounds like it is summoning to the end of time itself, night like a great abyss opening up, a gaping mouth.

Bell-ringing

 Following on from the New Year's post on Malcolm Guite and bell-ringing; this has brought back memories of childhood, when I used to live across from Saint Mary's Church in Leatherhead, south of London. The bells would give tempo to the week, of course Sunday being the great outburst of pealing. And the joyful bells of a wedding day. Living without it was unimaginable. It was as natural as the surrounding Surrey hills.

And memories of later life, of all my visits back to England to visit my mother and father. In their village in Northamptonshire, the peals can be heard from anywhere. 

This really is part of English life; our shared soundscape. Imagine how barren it would be without them, regardless of our religious faith, or lack of it. Apparently that is what it was like during the last War. Imposed silence. The sound of bells was reserved to warn the country of impending invasion. And in the end, they sounded victory. 

The particular form of 'change ringing' is a great, mathematical art, as Malcolm Guite says in his video. Here is an extract from the Encyclopedia Britannica on the subject:

Change ringing: traditional English art of ringing a set of tower bells in an intricate series of changes, or mathematical permutations (different orderings in the ringing sequence), by pulling ropes attached to bell wheels.(...) In ringing a peal, no bell moves more than one place forward or backward in the ringing order in each successive change, nor is it repeated or omitted, nor is any sequence (change) repeated. 

 

Malcolm Guite in the New Year - 'Ring out the thousand wars of old, Ring in the thousand years of peace' (Lord Tennyson)

 What better way to see in the New Year than with the scholar, poet, and musician Malcolm Guite, in his cosy study sipping his whisky and puffing away on his pipe. And all to the sound of the majestic 106th part of Alfred Lord Tennyson's In Memoriam A.H.H. The message is powerful, full of what we need in the world; ringing out all that is old and worn and destructive, and ringing in a life of renewal.

As Malcolm points out, there is a long tradition of Church bell-ringing in England, and the very intricate art of 'change-ringing', in which, as he says, 'the sequences of the bells alter on a sort of mathematical principle'. 

Here is the link to the short video, and below, the full text of the poem he recites. He then goes on to recite one of his own poems about the deep effect on him of the sound of church bells in contrast to the "electronic squawking" coming from our mobile devices:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

   The flying cloud, the frosty light:

   The year is dying in the night;

Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

Ring out the old, ring in the new,

   Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

   The year is going, let him go;

Ring out the false, ring in the true.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind

   For those that here we see no more;

   Ring out the feud of rich and poor,

Ring in redress to all mankind.

Ring out a slowly dying cause,

   And ancient forms of party strife;

   Ring in the nobler modes of life,

With sweeter manners, purer laws.

Ring out the want, the care, the sin,

   The faithless coldness of the times;

   Ring out, ring out my mournful rhymes

But ring the fuller minstrel in.

Ring out false pride in place and blood,

   The civic slander and the spite;

   Ring in the love of truth and right,

Ring in the common love of good.

Ring out old shapes of foul disease;

   Ring out the narrowing lust of gold;

   Ring out the thousand wars of old,

Ring in the thousand years of peace.

Ring in the valiant man and free,

   The larger heart, the kindlier hand;

   Ring out the darkness of the land,

Ring in the Christ that is to be.

Edgar Allan Poe: "In Our Time" - BBC Radio 4

 As mentioned in class when we were looking at the Gothic influences behind the opening to Dickens' Great Expectations, here is the link to the recent programme on BBC Radio 4 on the American writer Edgar Allan Poe. 

I recommend 'In Our Time', and the wonderful Melvyn Bragg for all sorts of other interesting programmes.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001svfv

Shakespeare's world - a recording

 In class we have begun thinking about Shakespeare by listening to an episode of the BBC's excellent radio series, "Shakespeare's Restless World", which takes an object found from the time, and brings out its significance socially, politically, and in terms of Shakespeare's plays. This episode, called 'City life, urban strife', takes a woolen cap worn by the lower echelons of society. There was even a parliamentary statute which stipulated that males over the age of six had to wear a wool cap on Sundays and holidays!

The programme also considers how the very many apprentices of the day would wear one, and often get into trouble in town and go wild particularly on Shrove Tuesday just before the rigours of Lent set in. In fact, disorderly behaviour was commonplace, and the crowds could easily become a 'mob' and a serious threat to power structures at the time. 

Listen to the episode by clicking on the link below. And prepare a fully summary of its main ideas:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nYeRynW04vN-B8uLpuYfWm-KGeFrvzoh/view?usp=sharing

BBC: Five minutes with Peter Ackroyd

Author Peter Ackroyd talks to Matthew Stadlen about the diverse nature of his work, the importance of time, and his fascination with London. Amazing what you can fit into five minutes. Do listen! This is one of the great writers of our age, with his novels, histories, and biographies, including an exceptional one on Dickens, and one on his favourite city, London: https://www.amazon.co.uk/London-Biography-Peter-Ackroyd/dp/0099422581/ref=sr_1_3?keywords=peter+ackroyd&qid=1682347789&sprefix=peter+ack%2Caps%2C116&sr=8-3

Ackroyd has a phenomenal mind; he manages to garner encyclopedic knowledge of his subjects, and rework it into a brilliantly imaginative vision. 

William Blake and his Business of Creation | Cultural Insights with Susanne Sklar

 Valuable insights into the English poet, painter, draughtsman, and printmaker William Blake (1757-1827) by scholar Susanne Sklar, who will be giving a series of Blake seminars from 1st June to 6th July at the Temenos Academy. Venue: the Rudolf Steiner House, London NW1.
Here is a short interview and video to give some idea of this towering figure of the Imaginative Vision, more relevant to our times than ever. Blake is a healthy figure to have around, to take issue powerfully with some of the more questionable premises of our times:

 http://www.theculturalaficionado.com/cultural-insights-with-susanne-sklar-2/

She says: "The humanities are being eradicated. Blake scholars are becoming an endangered species – though we continue to write, to teach, and reach outside academia where Blake’s vision is warmly welcomed. He’s inspired Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Gregory Bateson (the cybernetics pioneer), R.Crumb, Philip Pullman, and environmental activists (among others). Scholarship, of course, is necessary, for entering into Blake’s greatest works requires the kind of rigorous critical and imaginative thinking an archaeologist must have when uncovering hidden cities. William Blake cannot be compartmentalised. His vision goes beyond political correctness; he’s uninterested in subverting dominant paradigms. Where there is no hierarchy subversion isn’t necessary. His work can change the way we think about the deep structures of relationship and reality."

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

 In the Western world, there can be few Christmas stories, outside the Biblical ones of course, that have had such an enduring influence on our celebrations at this time of the year as Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol (1843). It has even been said that Dickens invented our modern idea of Christmas through his yearly offering of Christmas Tales. I have my grandmother's copy of these timeless stories that she inscribed with her name when a young lady, and I began reading A Christmas Carol on that most suitable of days, and the day on which the story begins, Christmas Eve. 

I don't think any writer outside Shakespeare has created such imaginatively powerful characters as Dickens has. They are larger than life, fairy-tale-like in their familiar magical otherness, have entered our imaginative consciousness and become part of the furniture of our minds; the Pantheon of the English imagination. Ebenezer Scrooge features strongly among them, the archetypal miser whose meanness and cold heart slowly melt away as four supernatural presences manifest to show him the truth: his deceased associate Marley, and the Ghosts of Christmas Past, of Christmas Present and the last visitor, the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. 

What an extraordinary opening line!: 'Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.' We know what we have on our hands, another installment from our greatest storywriter, 'the inimitable Dickens'. We know we will be entertained with his infectious humour, we know we will be treated to a supernatural tale, and all within the first six words. 

As I wander wide-eyed through the magic world of Scrooge's Counting House, the London Streets at Christmas, the visions summoned up by the Ghosts of Scrooge's childhood and youth and the modest household of his clerk Bob Cratchet, I am amazed by the breadth of this imaginative vision, the richness and density of the prose, a prose which even after a hundred and eighty years is as fresh and delightful as it was when it was first penned. It gives us humbling food for thought to consider that these stories were read by 'all and sundry', the rich, the not so rich, the barely literate, the poor, the uneducated; and understood, and loved. It is true that people did not have today's distractions, the screens of telephones, computers, televisions, and endless media chatter, but most people struggled to get by, like today, and very many lived in the deepest poverty. But the world of mass production of standardised products was limited, people lived more sedentary lives, communities still flourished on the bedrock of age-old customs and traditions, language, although cheapened by a largely mercantile society, retained some of its density. And Dickens' world is dynamic, everything, even the most ordinary of objects, have a liveliness and life of their own. Here is an early description of the mid-winter London outdoors:

The ancient tower of a church, whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there. The cold became intense.

And here, the lively bustling streets of ice, and the glow and warmth of human habitation and activity; again we note that objects are not 'inanimate'in this world, they have expressions, personality, even feelings:

 In the main street, at the corner of the court, some labourers were repairing the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier, round which a party of ragged men and boys were gathered: warming their hands and winking their eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed, and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness of the shops where holly sprigs and berries crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers’ and grocers’ trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant, with which it was next to impossible to believe that such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor’s household should; and even the little tailor, whom he had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up to-morrow’s pudding in his garret, while his lean wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

 And what about the description of the first supernatural apparition, Marley, his associate, seven years dead, whose face first appears in the place of Scrooge's ... doorknocker:

And then let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door, saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate process of change—not a knocker, but Marley’s face. Marley’s face. It was not in impenetrable shadow as the other objects in the yard were, but had a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air; and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly motionless.

 In our televised or film versions of Dickens, we can forget what a most perculiar, strikingly original, and downright out-of-this-world imagination he has. What a strange image!: "a dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark cellar". Surely, something utterly surreal, nightmarish.

What mind would then think the next imaginative thought, when Scrooge closes the door behind him?

'and he did look cautiously behind it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the sight of Marley’s pigtail sticking out into the hall.'

And the comically strange sight of the transparent ghost of Marley, standing in Scrooge's room:

His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him, and looking through his waistcoat, could see the two buttons on his coat behind. 

This detail of the buttons is amusing; and very human too in its perceptiveness; we know in the oddest, even most extreme circumstances, how our attention can alight on the most apparently trivial detail. The 'two buttons' observation is also a reminder that although this might be in part a ghost story, it is not a 'horror' or 'gothic' story, it is not entirely serious; the ghosts are not a threat, but a reminder of a higher order of things, a reminder of what remains to be done in our precious time on earth. 

Finally, in this first part, and on a graver note, the ghost of Marley carries in him the weight of a spiritual sickness, brought about by never having lived his life on earth outside the narrow perimetres of the counting house, never having lived generously with a thought for others' wealthfare - and his visit from beyond the grave is an act of grace, to warn Scrooge not to live like this and to avoid the tortured wanderings of a disincarnate soul after death. Marley and Scrooge have both 'forged' the chains of their own present misery and self-confinement. 

“It is required of every man,” the Ghost returned, “that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death. It is doomed to wander through the world—oh, woe is me!—and witness what it cannot share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to happiness!”

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain and wrung its shadowy hands.

“You are fettered,” said Scrooge, trembling. “Tell me why?”

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” replied the Ghost. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?”

Scrooge trembled more and more.

“Or would you know,” pursued the Ghost, “the weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself? It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since. It is a ponderous chain!”

New Simon Armitage poem on our times

The current poet laureate, Simon Armitage, has recently published a striking, original poem on our unstable disturbing times, whose final vision is perhaps what he himself calls 'hope'. It is an imaginative response to the COP-26 climate summit taking place in Glasgow. I particularly like the powerful line, 'It's T minus zero/of the Petroleum Era' (T minus... is a term used for the countdown prior to a rocket launch). The short lines create a sense of impending doom, or perhaps of a world teetering on the brink of a new dawn, the central ambiguity of this poem. Here is his introductory piece, followed by the poem, published on the Guardian website today:

I wanted to react to COP-26  – so many of my friends and colleagues have been emboldened by the conversation it has generated. And strange times sometimes lead to strange poems.

I was trying to chart the peculiar dream-like state we seem to be in, where the rules and natural laws of the old world feel to be in flux, one of those dreams which are full of danger, but not completely beyond the control of the person who sleeps.

The speaker in the poem is watching a world out of kilter, and is full of doubt and distrust, but seems to pluck up enough personal courage to face the future. Let’s call it hope.

 

Futurama

I crawl out onto the rooftop

above the world’s junkshop,

lean against the warm chimney

and eyeball the city.

The vibe is … let’s say ethereal,

rows of TV aerials

spelling out HEAVEN,

spelling out ARMAGEDDON.

It’s T minus zero

of the Petroleum Era –

all my neighbours

are burning tomorrow’s newspapers

in their back-gardens,

getting their alibis sharpened.

As the hours evaporate

I say to my spirit

I can’t really pilot

this smouldering twilight

over the scars and crevasses,

but I’ll put on my best sunglasses

and steer the cockpit of morning

into the oncoming.

William Blake, the Bible and Western culture

I'm currently reading the poet and critic Kathleen Raine's great work on William Blake and Job. Blake was a poet and painter/engraver from the end of the 18th and early 19th century. Her book is on Blake's illustrations to the Old Testament book The Book of Job. Blake, like most western artists until relatively recently, drew inspiration from the Bible. This was seen as normal, and was sometimes even unconscious, so ingrained was Christianity in the collective mind and spirit, the "DNA" of even the most modest person socially and economically. So it is impossible to understand the West's artistic heritage on the deepest levels (often, even on the most basic levels) without a knowledge and appreciation of biblical text, particularly in the form of the stories, because the Judeo-Christian scriptures embody meaning essentially as story, "mythos". The meaning unfolds largely in narrative form. This is what is meant by "myth", which is not some invention to be opposed to "real historical fact". In any case, the deepest levels of meaning revealed to us when we hear a story are not on the historical level. They disclose themselves to us in the present encounter with the text, our experience of the text, as it were.

The Book of Job is the story of a wealthy and pious man who falls prey to a series of terrible events depriving him of all he had: family, material goods and pĥysical health. It is an archetypal story of Man's suffering, and transcending this suffering, thus prefiguring the Christ story itself. The Bible is made up of patterns of story in this way.

To be ignorant of these narratives (the Creation Myth, the Fall of Man, Noah and the Flood, exodus and exile in Egypt, Samson and Delilah, and the Christ narrative and the narratives within this narrative in the form of Jesus's parables, the list is endless) is to be alienated from one's own culture (and spiritual foundations, if one is open to such a thing as a spiritual nature). This on one level is nothing to do with "belief". We might begin more easily with "meaning". It is more than useful for example to have a Biblical knowledge when reading or watching Shakespeare. This takes its form mainly symbolically, including symbol in movement, as unfolding dramatic narrative. Even in King Lear, a play which takes place in pagan Britain, the blueprint is largely Christian.

Click below to access examples of Blake's illustrations (Job surrounded by his family at the beginning, Job suffering scorn, Job's final blessings), and the extract from Raine's work:  

Chaucer - The Knight's Tale

A while ago I published a brief post on Medieval literature, and have been meaning for a long time to put up texts from this wonderfully creative period. It is about time I did! So here is an example from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.  This is regarded as the greatest work of the period, and Chaucer as the father of English poetry. The English language had been growing in status during the Middle Ages, both as a scholarly and literary medium. Since the Norman invasion, French had become the language of the court, and Latin had maintained its position as the medium for the highest levels of thinking and creativity. But the winds were changing in the fifteenth century. The Canterbury Tales contain a series of stories related by individuals from varied strata of society: the Wife of Bath, the Knight, the Miller, the Franklin etc. Each character entertains his or her companions with a tale during the famous pilgrimage to Canterbury Cathedral where Thomas à Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, was murdered on the orders of King Henry II on 29th December 1120. As a consequence, he became a martyr and a saint. 

Each tale is wonderfully rich and entertaining, full of action, love stories, philosophical reflections, and sometimes bawdy humour! They are written in the classic iambic pentametre of English verse, more precisely in 'Herioc Verse' (ten syllable rhyming couplets). 

Below is an extract from The Knight's Tale, the point at which the young Theban lover Arcite, banished from Athens, and pining for his belovéd Emyle, decides to pull himself together and out of his hopelessly languishing lover state, dress up as  a pauper and return in disguise to the Greek city. Do not be put off by Middle English. This is not Old English (which would be incomprehensible, and needs to be learned as another language), but the English language gradually blossoming into what we know today. There are lexical difficulties (well explained by the notes from the Norton Edition), and syntactical intricacies which come from a naturally poetic style, and convention, and a more germanic word order: 'Whan that Arcite to Thebes comen was...' - nothing too obscure! I have a particular fondness for this tale, because it is the one I studied at school when I was seveneen/eighteen. Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

Aldous Huxley recording: The Ultimate Revolution

 The great twentieth century literary figure and thinker Aldous Huxley should need no introduction. He is most famous for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1932), in which he imagines a society, prophetically when we consider the contemporary world and where it is going, under a form of 'soft' dictatorship, in which suffering has been 'banished' through medication, and types of people are conceived and brought up artificially to fulfull ideologically defined roles. It is a 'comfortable' world, in which individual freedom has been confiscated, and responsibility abdicated. Sound familiar?

In this recording, made in front of an audience on March 20th 1962 at Berkeley Language Center in the United States, he goes back over his dystopian work, comparing it to Orwell's 1984, which he admires greatly. However, he feels that the future forms of dictatorship will not be Orwell's 'terroristic' ones, a vision influenced by the recent context of its composition, world war, Nazism, and Stalinism, but a 'soft' one something in line with his own prediction. This will be enabled by the advances of technology combined with the modern media, biotechnology and pharmacological methods, making people, as he says, 'love their servitude':

 “There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies, so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.”

Click on the link below to acces the 44 minute recording. He also considers the future influence of automation, and transhumanism. All in 1960! 

Poet Laureate's verse for HRH the Duke of Edinburgh

 This afternoon the funeral of HRH Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh took place at Windsor in the presence of thirty guests. Our thoughts go out to all the Royal Family, particularly Queen Elizabeth II, his wife for seventy-three years.  As is befitting for such a moment, the country's Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage, has composed the following poem:

The Patriarchs – An Elegy

The weather in the window this morning
is snow, unseasonal singular flakes,
a slow winter’s final shiver. On such an occasion
to presume to eulogise one man is to pipe up
for a whole generation – that crew whose survival
was always the stuff of minor miracle,
who came ashore in orange-crate coracles,
fought ingenious wars, finagled triumphs at sea
with flaming decoy boats, and side-stepped torpedoes.

Husbands to duty, they unrolled their plans
across billiard tables and vehicle bonnets,
regrouped at breakfast. What their secrets were
was everyone’s guess and nobody’s business.
Great-grandfathers from birth, in time they became
both inner core and outer case
in a family heirloom of nesting dolls.
Like evidence of early man their boot-prints stand
in the hardened earth of rose-beds and borders.

They were sons of a zodiac out of sync
with the solar year, but turned their minds
to the day’s big science and heavy questions.
To study their hands at rest was to picture maps
showing hachured valleys and indigo streams, schemes
of old campaigns and reconnaissance missions.
Last of the great avuncular magicians
they kept their best tricks for the grand finale:
Disproving Immortality and Disappearing Entirely.

The major oaks in the wood start tuning up
and skies to come will deliver their tributes.
But for now, a cold April’s closing moments
parachute slowly home, so by mid-afternoon
snow is recast as seed heads and thistledown.

Charles Williams on Poetry

 One of my all-time favourite figures in the literary world of the last century is Charles Williams. For some, for very few, he needs no introduction, but he has been obscured by his more famous friends, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Together, with other extraordinary people, notably Owen Barfield who died relatively recently, they formed a group called The Inklings in Oxford during the nineteen thirties and forties. These men met in each others' homes to discuss literary and philosophical matters, and read out their own work before publication. C.S. Lewis would read from his novels and religious and philosophical writings, Tolkien from the later-to-be-published The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. They would also meet up in an Oxford pub 'The Eagle and Child' (a wonderful place I recommend) over a few pints of the best English ale.

As for Charles Williams, the least formally 'educated' of the group, and from the most modest background, he worked for the Oxford University Press (at the time they would place the definite article in front of OUP) as editor, writer and critic. He was a singular and remarkable poet himself, and wrote a series of extraordinary novels, seven in total, which bring the supernatural into the everyday world of England. I would strongly recommend them, they were popular in their day, T.S. Eliot encouraged his writing, and they stand as a monument to a remarkable mind. They are: War in Heaven, Many Dimensions, The Place of the Lion, The Greater Trumps, Shadows of Ecstasy, Descent into Hell, and All Hallow's Eve. 

He wrote plays too, and books of literary criticism (for want of a better term; I prefer 'reflection'), and I recently found a first edition from 1932 which I am thoroughly enjoying. As with most of Williams' prose, it is curious in style, dense and challenging in its insights. This one is called The English Poetic Mind, in which he attempts to define, or at least touch upon, what characterises this phenomenon, looking in particular at Wordsworth, Shakespeare and Milton. I have scanned below a section from the opening, "What makes great poetry', in which he quotes Wordsworth's insights into poetic creation. For the Romantic poet, it needs 1) 'the vital soul' 2) 'general truths' 3) 'external things - Forms, images'. Williams expands upon this, by saying that the great poets 'arouse in us an actual sense of our own faculties' for such things as heroism, love, exile, although these things may be alien to or limited in us. This makes me think of the poem 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' by the War Poet Wilfred Owen, which we have been looking at in class recently. We could not possibly understand the terrible experience of trench warfare ourselves, but the poem awakens in us a deep sympathy, and at least shades of understanding, however distant, and in some sense we are connected to the young men who suffered and died during this conflict. 

Below you will find the link to the extract from Williams' book:

New poem by John F. Deane

 A while ago I was asked by the Temenos Academy Review to write a review of a collection of poems by the Irish poet John F. Deane, called Achill Island, which I strongly recommend:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Achill-Island-John-F-Deane/dp/1782188991/ref=sr_1_2?crid=2WYKPRIKS377E&dchild=1&keywords=john+f+deane&qid=1615188704&sprefix=john+f+deane%2Caps%2C381&sr=8-2

 It was a wonderful time, because I got to discover this extraordinary poet. He has just released this new poem, which I would like to share on the blog. It finds great resonance with our times, of health crisis, lockdowns, curfews, and restricted freedoms - a time unique in human history, all the more for it being a planetary event. Deane has responded beautifully to the sense of release brought by openness to the natural world, the sense of "emergence" at last. Here it is:

William Blake: In the Beginning (Peter Ackroyd)

Following on from our class discussion today, here are the opening pages to Peter Ackroyd's biography of William Blake, which I mentioned. It answers the question asked today about his social background; modest middle class. His father was a hosier (un bonnetier), and they lived in a London house Ackroyd describes as "solid if not exactly prosperous". I will leave you to savour the writing of this remarkable biographer and novelist; how he can make us relive moments in the past with vivid detail. Note the reference to 'the piping infant' recalling our study of Songs of Innocence and Experience. His account is never purely factual, but imbued with a sense of the times, and the meaning held in the smallest details of life. I also strongly recommend his biography of Charles Dickens.

Click on the link below to access the excerpt:

HS2 Rail link and a 250 year old pear tree

What would Gerard Manley Hopkins feel about this?

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/aug/17/tree-of-the-week-the-beloved-250-year-old-wild-pear-being-cut-down-for-hs2

Hopkins' Binsey Poplars: 'O if we but knew what we do...'

More about trees...Below you can read one of my favourite poems, by Gerard Manley Hopkins. It is about the brutal felling of a row of poplar trees near the village of Binsey near Oxford.  It was written in 1879, and resonates strongly with us in this time of ecological crisis. 

Hopkins' highly original, even revolutionary, style is in sharp contrast to his retiring life as a Jesuit priest. The striking images and vigorous unconventional rhythms express a love of and feeling for the vitality of nature, and an existential grappling with the questions of life. 

Le Chêne de Flagey (Gustave Courbet)

Following on from yesterday's post on tradition, the symbol and the tree, thank you Cécile for your very interesting comments about the painter Courbet. Here is the painting you mention, Le Chêne de Flagey of 1864 (The Oak at Flagey) that you mentioned. I can't add anything better than your comments below, and the extraordinary painting itself: "Quand je lis ce texte superbe sur le symbolisme de l'arbre, je pense immédiatement au Chêne de Flagey de Gustave Courbet. Un chêne tellement grand qu'il sort du cadre. Sa cime, ses frondaisons, ses racines échappent à l'emprise du cadre qui pourtant le magnifie. Et ce chêne, c'est Courbet lui-même, fort, résistant, déterminé, enraciné dans sa terre du Jura, et s'épanouissant à Paris."

Click below for the painting:

Tradition - The symbol of the Tree

In class we often, necessarily, talk of tradition. The knee-jerk reaction might be rejection of tradition because, throughout history, those embodying forms of tradition have often abused positions of power in its name. But we are talking about something quite different here. It is not dusty and fuddy-duddy, blocking the way for us to the newness and freshness we all long for. Quite the opposite.

There are archetypal patterns, symbols, some of them shared by the whole of humanity. We are born into a world which is Nature itself, our own bodies firstly; and Nature, the rain, storms, cloudy skies, birdsong, sunrise, are among our very first impressions, and accompany us all throughout our lives, in joyful and harder times. They speak to us deeply, on deeper levels than we can really, fully articulate, and the artists naturally turn to this primordial language. So we might define tradition as the universal 'language' which speaks to us because it conforms to or reflects our unchanging inner natures as human beings. 

This language can take the form of story, legend, myth, such as the myths of Creation, the Fall of Man, Divine vengeance, the Flood, the great Quest of the Holy Grail, or the journeys across the seas, tales of exile and return to the kingdom. These narratives underpin many if not most of our great stories and dramas, because they are the eternal blueprint of what our lives actually are, unfolding in time as narrative, and encountering the storms and clear skies of all voyages. We all begin at home, leave, and in some way return. These stages, or phases, might be related to location, or not. Whatever they are, we all experience them as feeling, impression, sensation, intuition.

I don't think any great artists can be disconnected from tradition. They may react against it, as was the case of the Modernists, but that was in the knowledge of what they were reacting against.

Below is an extract from Northrop Frye's The Great Code, a brilliant study of biblical language, image and story, in relation to other traditions. This part concerns the networks of meaning related to the tree. They include of course the cross, as demonic image and image of salvation, Adam, Jack and the Beanstalk, the Hanged Man of the Tarot pack.

What could be more primordial than the tree, symbolically, and literally? It gives shade to man and animal, it is a habitat for millions of creatures, its roots burrow deep into the earth as we need roots, it stands vertically as we stand, 'dressé vers le Ciel', as Rémi Brague describes mankind's unique stance on the Earth in his remarkable study of our place in the Cosmos: https://www.amazon.fr/Sagesse-monde-Histoire-lexp%C3%A9rience-lunivers/dp/2253943223/ref=sr_1_7?__mk_fr_FR=%C3%85M%C3%85%C5%BD%C3%95%C3%91&dchild=1&keywords=remi+brague&qid=1603101585&sr=8-7

and its branches recall our hair, or can be the mirror image of the roots in the Earth but crisscrossing the sky.

Click on the link below to access the Frye document in pdf form:

Kathleen Raine: The Use of the Beautiful

In these challenging times, perhaps the most challenging nationally and globally since the last world war, it is important we turn to the great values of our cultures, and look for unity in all things. For millenia, Beauty has been central to philosophy and artistic creation, and in this essay, from her remarkable collection Defending Ancient Springs, the poetess Kathleen Raine affirms these eternal principles. 

This blog is a space for open enquiry and debate, so when you read the essay, add your comments in the comments section of the site, your thoughts, questions, anything that comes to mind. Do not hesitate. Say something, because these thoughts cannot leave us indifferent!

Click on the link below to download the essay in pdf format. 

For Hypokhâgne 811 - Extract from Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick'

For those absent from class yesterday, here is the extract from Melville's Moby-Dick. For Friday 6th November you need to come to class with questions 1, 2, 3 and 4 prepared in note form for oral presentation. Have a good break!

Click on the link below to download and print out the document:

Two translations (versions) for Hypokhâgne 811

 For those absent from class yesterday, here are the two short texts to translate. You need to prepare the first one, for presentation in class on Friday 13th November. Have a good holiday, keep well!

Click on the link below to access and print out the pdf document:

Middle English literature

Since the Norman invasion of 1066, Anglo-Saxon had been displaced as the language of the court and the ruling classes of England, and was mainly spoken by the peasant classes. The English kings and queens spoke French for going on three hundred years. And very few high-ranking members of society spoke English. But a big shift was underway in the 14th century and English was back with a vengeance, in new and exciting ways! Freed from imposed rules and customs, it had taken on a life of its own, evolving 'underground' at its own pace and integrating elements from French especially. This vastly increased its scope, its vocabulary and idiom, and it was rapidly regaining respectability among the learned and the elites of the country. The tendancy was encouraged by the highly nationalistic outlook of the king, Edward III (1312-1377), who spoke English, and expressed pride in the language. When Henry IV claimed the throne in 1399, he did so in front of Parliament, in English. Nothing could stop it now.

Ted Hughes: The Birthday Letters

Ted Hughes is widely regarded as one of the greatest post-war British poets. He came from Yorkshire, and wrote mainly nature poetry, expressing the ruggedness and an often dark side to the animal world. He is also known for having been the husband of American poetess Sylvia Plath, until she took her life in 1963. Late on in life, and many years after his marriage to Plath, Hughes wrote a powerful set of poems addressed to her, published in 1998, and called Birthday Letters. This verse stands out starkly from his other work, and is deeply intimate and personal, expressing his love and pain, as he tries to come to terms with this difficult period of his life.

By following the link below, you will find the deeply symbolic poem, 'Sam', about an incident during which Sylvia Plath loses control of her horse:

"A Room of One's Own" by Virginia Woolf - broadcast on BBC Radio 4

The HK class have been writing a commentary on Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway. This morning while listening to BBC Radio 4 over breakfast, I heard they are going to be broadcasting a dramatisation of her major work, A Room of One's Own. Interestingly, it was recorded during lockdown with actors and production team all in rooms of their own. It should be very good.

Virginia Woolf's funny, provoking and insightful feminist text on female creativity dramatised for radio by Linda Marshall Griffiths.

Part of Electric Decade: classic titles that influenced and characterised the 1920's.

It is 1928, a woman is asked to talk of women and writing. In the university town of 'Oxbridge' she is refused entry to the gardens and library and discovers the poverty of the one female college there. She searches the British Museum library for proof that women even existed in history.

You will find the link below to click on and listen. It will be available shortly after broadcast tomorrow 31st May:

'Passage to Modernity' - evolution of the self, of language, and literary forms

In previous posts I have published thoughts on artistic creation from philosophers and poets. What interests me in particular is the evolution in our sense of selfhood over the centuries; because how we conceive of ourselves today is radically different from how our ancestors did, in the Classical world, in the Medieval Age, the Renaissance and the Early Modern period. It can be enriching to think of these things, because they allow us to see our own confused and difficult times perhaps at one remove, putting them in healthy perspective.

It is difficult to introduce such thinking without making inaccurate generalisations. Yet we could say that in ancient societies there existed a sense of the self not just in relation to itself, or the collective, but the cosmic; that the individual was not seen as a discete, atomistic entity with its private desires and concerns in isolation, but as a part of a cosmic whole, with its God or pantheon of gods, its mythologies, its cosmologies, cosmogonies, astronomy and astrology, and its ancestors. When we read poetry, epic or shorter poems, watch plays or read novels, rarely do we see these phenomena as quite unique and special, and lying within a long evolution of the human story. Shakespeare seen in this way is revolutionary, Hamlet, hugely modern, the novel, a recent invention inconceivable until relatively recent times. The question is, Why?

The modern period is characterised by the increased significance given to the individual, while the cosmic sense has withdrawn entirely, to leave mankind thrown back upon himself, with quite different existential and artistic questions from before. 

The extract below, from Louis Dupré's excellent work Passage to Modernity (1993, Yale University), traces, from this wide perspective, the ways in which our sense of self and the world have changed, and thereby changed the very literary forms we now take for granted. 

Dupré also, necessarily, considers how our conception of language itself has changed fundamentally with this shift towards the discrete individual.

Dupré's is dense thinking, but wonderful to grasp. I think that giving it time and staying carefully with it can reap very great rewards!

Click on the link below to download the pdf document:

'O sweet spontaneous...': e e cummings (HK)

e e cummings was a leading figure in the American Modernist movement. Like the manner of writing  his name, his poems are idiosyncratic; lower-case letters and an absence of punctuation. He nevertheless, like most Modernists, remains traditional on many levels along with being avant-garde; his themes of love, use of the sonnet form, and a shared affinity with the Romantics. 

You will find one of his most famous poems, 'O sweet spontaneous...' by clicking on the link below. We will be looking at this in class.

Poetry by Vernon Watkins - for HK and anyone who loves a good poet!

Vernon Watkins (1906-1967) was a Welsh poet, translator and painter. During his lifetime he was highly regarded, though never at the height of fashion. He has since been rather neglected, unlike his friend and fellow Welshman, Dylan Thomas. Watkins took poetry very seriously, from his ealiest years: "I was already writing poems when I was seven or eight, and between that age and twelve bought the English poets one by one". These early years were marked by great ambition and determination to become recognised, but he came to care little, if not at all, for fame or recognition, only for the vision and craftsmanship needed in all good poetry. This is grounded, in Watkins' verse, in an uncompromising modernity, at the same time as drawing on tradition. As he said: "The fountain, what is it? What is ancient, what is fresh".

Here is a sonnet he wrote about poetry itself, from Fidelities (1967):

The prose purveyors of doubt, the dismantlers of

Ecstasy, who traffic without a god

In broken metre, would have their Pegasus shod

Wth discord, not strict numbers. At love they scoff,

And then, in the revolution of anti-love,

Unsheathe chaos, the death of the period,

While a new Sibyl, shrieking above her tripod,

Proclaims transformation, treachery, trough.

Yet even the disenchanted, disordered, fret

For lost order. Breakers recall rhyme,

Anchors weighed, and divine proportions set.

As hawk hovers, as compass needle in time

Flies unswerving, steadied, where the stars climb,

Fixed laws hallow what none can forget.

to curry favour: "flatter, seek favour by officious show of courtesy or kindness"

Through the miracle of association, which can lead you all sorts of places, I got to thinking about this rather wonderful and strange expression in English: to curry favour. I found, remarkably, that it has nothing to do with either Indian spices, or 'favour'. 

It all began while reading Les Trois Mousquetaires, when I recently came across some colourful verbs like 'ferrailler' and "étriller un cheval". Not knowing much about things equestrian, I wanted to find out the English for "étriller", which is (specialists might correct me) 'to curry', or 'to currycomb' a horse. This led in turn to wondering what brushing down a horse had to do with one of my favourite dishes, so I began an investigation into 'curry', and this is what I found in Skeat's exciting (no irony intended) etymological dictionary:

The Culture of Modernity - Charles Taylor (HK/KH)

In a much earlier post, I put up a chapter from the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor's excellent work, Sources of the Self. I have chosen another chapter to put on line for you, which I think is particularly interesting and useful, from a literary point of view. It comes in the middle of a long enquiry into the evolution of a sense of self, from the Middle Ages to this point in his study: the eighteenth century. So it might not be fully understandable at the outset. Be patient, it is a good read! And Taylor has the virtue of being clear and intellectually integral.

His approach here is quite literary, because he refers to the growing trend and development of the novel at this time, particularly in Britain, but with references to France, for example Rousseau's La Nouvelle Héloïse. He mentions Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748), two epistolary novels (a fashionable form at the time) by Samuel Richardson, and of course Daniel Defoe's works, which all embodied the new sense of importance given to 'sentiment', and the moral value of 'noble and good' sentiment within the context of relationship, especially marriage. It was also the time in which greater validity was given to childhood, as a distinct period in life. We can see future elements of Romanticism in embryonic form.

Upmost in this thinking is the growth of the private sphere, along with the importance given to 'the ordinary life', all of which we now take for granted. He articulates this as a major shift from 'archetypal' vision to the subject being the locus of meaning, particularly in its quality of instrumental, reasoning subject. The new understanding replaces the traditional cosmology based on hierarchy. Whereas before (and we can see this in Shakespeare) Nature corresponded to and found an echo in human being through a cosmology structured around hierarchies which could be disrupted, now what counts is the effect Nature has on us, the locus of feeling, and the way it reflects our feelings, our mood. This developed over a long period, and the novel, with its attention to the detail of ordinary life, expressed and reinforced this.

You will find the chapter by clicking on the link below:

Owen Barfield on poetic language (Kh/HK)

Here are some interesting thoughts by Owen Barfield, friend of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, and one of the Inklings. This chapter, ‘Language and Poetry’, comes from his major, highly influential work Poetic Diction: A Study of Meaning.

Barfield here considers the stages through which poetry and poetic vision have passed, and the accompanying changes in language and thought. He begins, in a necessarily simplistic way, with the ‘concrete vocabulary’ of the world’s first mythologies, to Greek mythology as vector of meaning alongside living Nature, to the language of modernity. 

Particularly interesting are his remarks on the ancient Greek language of Homer being ‘looser’ than our more usual ‘architectural’ linguistic and poetic forms: ‘a living, muscular organism rather than as a structure...’. This move from an ‘organic’, ‘fluid’ type of poetry to the ‘architectural’ he places more or less in English from the seventeenth century onwards, for instance in Milton and the Metaphysicals, not so much in Chaucer or Shakespeare. The more ‘fluid’ types of verse are made for reciting, the more ‘architectural’, for reading, for seeing on the page.

He draws out the inherent tension between the ‘rational’ and the ‘poetic’ in the history of poetic utterance; the ‘rational, abstracting, formal principle’ and the ‘primal flow of meaning’. It is surely in a great poet like Shakespeare that we find the perfect balance; the great intelligence of an organising principle working with the ‘flow’ of life.

Compare the extracts of Shakespeare we have studied with Milton or John Donne, for example. The seventeenth century really is a watershed. Think of Milton's highly elaborate poetic architecture, the latinate syntax. I think in the twentieth century T. S. Eliot gave much thought to this, and brought back in a modern way the organic forms of poetic utterance in the context of Modernism.

Click here to download the chapter in pdf format:

'Fell' - let's look at a word

It is always healthy and interesting to stop for a second and look at a word. On this blog there are several posts on words (if you look at the categories on the left), on their origins, their etymology. When you start looking, you can see how each word is special, whereas before, probably, we just skimmed over it (as we only can most of the time). But each word is exciting, even the most apparently ordinary, and contains a whole history. 

In the post below I mentioned the 'fells' of Cumbria, a beautiful part of North West England which I recommend for anyone who likes walking, hiking and the great outdoors. 

So, apart from being the preterit of the verb to fall, what does fell mean, and where does today's word come from if it's a noun? 

This is what an etymological dictionary tells us, as we peer through the mists of time...:

BBC Radio 4: 'Yeats and Mysticism'

BBC broadcaster and writer Melvyn Bragg explores the strange and mystical world of the poet W B Yeats.

You will find the link below to the 2002 episode of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time on Yeats. Yeats, one of the greatest poets of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, was naturally drawn to many sources of spiritual knowledge, all of which nourished his extraordinary verse. We don't have to "believe" in these things of course, but they are part of him, and his complex character and deep soul.

Reading a novel by Patrick Modiano today, I came across a quotation ('I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake') from one of Yeats' most celebrated and powerful poems. Here it is, with the following lines. This is part of a much bigger poem. It is both apocalyptic in its images, and immensely gentle and loving:

He Bids His Love Be At Peace

I hear the Shadowy Horses, their long manes a-shake,
Their hoofs heavy with tumult, their eyes glimmering white;
The North unfolds above them clinging, creeping night,
The East her hidden joy before the morning break,
The West weeps in pale dew and sighs passing away,
The South is pouring down roses of crimson fire:
O vanity of Sleep, Hope, Dream, endless Desire,
The Horses of Disaster plunge in the heavy clay:
Beloved, let your eyes half close, and your heart beat
Over my heart, and your hair fall over my breast,
Drowning love's lonely hour in deep twilight of rest,
And hiding their tossing manes and their tumultuous feet.

Click on the link below to listen to the BBC Radio podcast:

Review of Achill: The Island - by John F. Deane

There are still many very good poets writing today. One of my favourites is the Irishman John F. Deane, who is greatly influenced by Kathleen Raine herself, and by Gerard Manley Hopkins, Ted Hughes, the Romantics, and many more besides. I would highly recommend this beautiful collection inspired by his island of birth, off the coast of Ireland. It contains twenty-five remarkable poems, illustrated by John Behan.

A Tribute to Kathleen Raine, her work and vision - Paris, March 2021

We are organising an international event around the work of the poet Kathleen Raine which will take place in Paris in March 2021. It will include guest speakers from France and abroad, talks on her poetry, her essays and autobiographies, her work on Yeats and Blake and other poets, as well as "tables rondes" on translations of her work into French and the Temenos Academy, which she founded in the early nineteen nineties. Here are the links to the Sorbonne pages for further information:

The Art of English - Fowler & Fowler

There is a strange idea around that English is somehow "easy", and that most people on Earth speak it, or at least "get by", which is apparently all you need in our globalised world of communication...

Because of historical events, it is true that English has spread enormously, aided by the British Empire followed by post-war American global domination. The downside to this is a certain cultural hegemony, a sort of globish, which helps trade and easy travel perhaps, but there must surely be more to communication, to the infinite richness of English, than trade, profit and mere usefulness.

English is above all beautiful, by its very nature. And certainly not easy! The great writers have risen to the challenge of English, and so in our way should we. It has its rules, its quirks and eccentricities. It has its nature, which has shifted over the centuries, and continues to shift. I think we need to live closely with its nature, "fit into it", like a pair of shoes, let it tell us what is best.

What makes for "good English"?

Poem for class 811

Here is the poem, or extract of a poem, to prepare for next week. It is one of the most famous examples of Romantic verse. Do your best and use your own ideas and own interpretations, not what you might find on the Internet. It can be easy to tell!

Click on the link to access the pdf document, and print it out if you can:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GAVZ-krWZGO1D2IeB-gViUr46BUXROVl/view?usp=sharing

Have a good weekend.
AJ

Victor Frankl: Man's Search for Meaning

This perhaps has nothing ostensibly to do with literature, and shouldn't be on a literary blog... But no matter. In fact, I think it does, and should, because our search for meaning - those blessed moments of life, when we connect with something deep and fulfulling - leads us to the poets, playwrights and novelists, because they can disclose the deeper meanings to existence. This of course was the official or unofficial manifesto of the Romantics, and of most evolutions in literary production. 

So here is an extract by a remarkable man, Victor Frankl, who was a psychologist and psychoanalyst, practising in Vienna before the second world war, and because of his Jewish background, found himself, along with his family, in several concentration camps. He survived, incredibly, and this experience, as he recounts in his bestselling work Man's Search for Meaning, which I strongly recommend, did not leave him in despair, but reinforced his conviction of the ultimate meaning of our lives. It is a powerful message he translated into a new school of therapy called 'logotherapy' which he mentions in this extract of Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. Frankl is not concerned with clever-sounding theories, but our actual lives. It is an existential approach. I think the examples he gives here are powerful. In this time of upheaval and deeply disturbing political, social and ecological developments in a more and more mechanically organised, purely profit-based society, when it is all to easy to lose sight of hope and meaning, it is salutary to consider this extraordinary voice.

Click on the link below to access the document:

Roger Scruton 1944-2020

Roger Scruton, who passed away on Sunday 12th January, was a remarkable philosopher, and one of Britain's leading intellectuals. An often controversial figure - always a healthy sign - he wrote with great integrity, and a love of wisdom. He would often lament the fact that our time has lost a sense of Beauty, and he would articulate this brilliantly, and hold up Beauty as an essential part of what it is to be human. He had, as the obituary says below, published in the magazine The Spectator, immense culture, including a love of music. He was also an accomplished pianist, and farmer.

A bower quiet for us...

The Romantics sought for a place where we can come back to ourselves, to essentials, away from the hustle and bustle of the world, and the mechanisation of life itself - which we surely still experience, in different ways today, and as intensely, if not more so, than at their time.

Keats reached the heights of poetic inspiration in his very short life. Some of his most extraordinary, and famous, lines come at the beginning of his long poem Endymion. Here they are:

Burly

Thinking about poetry, and the words chosen by our great poets, it seems that we have lost much of the traditional vocabulary and references that give the deeper resonances to life. It is a truism to say that the average number of words we each use has declined, and become, perhaps through the standardising influence of the Internet, and mass media, much flatter and less able to suggest nuance than before. With the decline, even the extinction, of age-old communities and their close-knit network of references and meanings, words disappear. 

The Tempest

In these tempest-tossed times, what better way to begin the new year than with a dynamic interpretation of Shakespeare's late play The Tempest. Here is Valentin Gerlier in the Lincoln Centre in London, giving us insights into the ways Shakespeare's incredible dramas work, how they unfold and affect us so deeply. He considers A Midsummer Night's Dream too, as an example of how Shakespeare uses the world of the Imagination as a transformative phenomenon in an otherwise rational, legalistic world (as Valentin describes the world of Athens in A Dream, before the moonlit magical world of the forest and the fairies gets to work). 

Click on the link below and listen, and no worries if you have not yet read the plays. The talk opens up all sorts of things, and will make you want to see or read them, again or for the first time:

Alec Guinness reading 'Journey of the Magi'

For those who don't know the connection between Star Wars and T.S. Eliot...

Here is a reading of Journey of the Magi by the English actor Alec Guinness. He can also be heard in a famous recording of Eliot's Four Quartets. He has quite an old style of delivery, but full of subtlety and delicate feeling for nuance. 

Alec Guinness is one of Britain's greatest stage and screen actors. He was a favourite of the director David Lean, who gave him star roles in his 1940's cinema adaptations of Dickens' Oliver Twist (playing Fagin) and Great Expectations (as Herbert Pocket), as well as the epic Doctor Zhivago. Then came fame for a new generation of cinema goers when he played the role of Obi-Wan Kenobi in the first ever Star Wars film released in 1977. 

Click on the video link below to hear the poem:

Journey of the Magi - T. S. Eliot

Happy Christmas to all visitors!

 Whatever our beliefs, we can hardly fail to be moved and simply struck by the greatness of T.S. Eliot's poem Journey of the Magi, published in 1927. It is a monument of Modernist poetry, a monologue by one of the Magi journeying from Palestine to visit the newborn Christ-child; a story of alienation, pain, exile, and curious homecoming where nothing can be as before. The Modernists wanted to break with tradition in the early 20th century, but it could never happen entirely. Eliot was one of the many Modernists whose culture embraced hundreds of years of Western tradition, which he reworked and integrated in brilliantly original ways; in free verse, modern existential questioning,  and an idiosyncratic conversational tone combined with lofty poetic speech. Here is the complete text:

Yeats, the last Romantic?

Can't resist, it's Yeats again! I have loved for so long the magnificent poem "Coole Park and Ballylee 1931", which is a tribute to his Patron, Lady Gregory, written during the last months of her final illness. Coole Park is her estate, a grand ancestral house in Ireland, and her decline and death coincide, for Yeats, with the demise of wider traditions, including romanticism. The line "We were the last romantics", so simple, resounds in the heart and mind, and stays there. Here is the final verse:

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

Because the theme recently has been country folk, and because in class at the moment we are looking at the Romantics, I thought it a good idea to post an extract from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, a seminal piece of writing which has come to be regarded as a kind of 'manifesto' for the Romantic poets - although they did not think of themselves in terms of a distinct movement of that name at the time. 

Wendell Berry on the Land

Following on from thoughts of enclosure, Hardy's England, and country folk...Here is an interesting essay, from the other side of the Pond, by the remarkable Kentucky farmer, essayist, thinker, ecologist and poet, Wendell Berry. He is regarded by many as a visionary, but with his farmer's feet firmly on the ground. And he speaks his mind, which I like a lot. Click on the link below:

Hilaire Belloc's 'Tarantella'

Hilaire Belloc, who wrote The Servile State quoted in the post below, was a popular poet in his day, and is famous for collections for children, including The Bad Child's Book of Beasts, More Beasts (for Worse Children), The Modern Traveller and Cautionary Tales for Children.

When I was child, I was given this poem at school, 'Tarantella', to learn by heart and recite in front of the class. I remember the sensation distinctly; I think it was the first time I really connected with poetry, because it is so musical, almost incantatory, and the rhythm in the middle part so vigorously expresses the movements of dance. I loved it, and still do!

Thomas Hardy's country folk on the roads

Following on from the last post on the gradual privatisation of England's land, and the resulting dispossession, here is the opening to Hardy's great novel 'The Mayor of Casterbridge' in which the protagonist Michael Henchard,  and his wife and child, are walking the country roads in search of seasonal work. The turnip-hoer they encounter relates how the village Weydon-Priors is on the decline, its houses being pulled down due to economic forces beyond their control. It is typical Hardy; a melancholic autumnal setting, estranged people, here an estranged couple, small dimished human activity on a backdrop of grand natural forces at work since the dawn of time. 

The Land Grab (suite)

In the post below, on the Northamptonshire peasant poet John Clare, I spoke of the traumatic effect on the inhabitants of rural England of the accelerated privatisation of the Common Land of the country. John Clare himself never got over this, and some of his most moving poems were written in response. This process of Enclosure gathered pace in the eighteenth century, and later, in the Victorian Age, the novelist Thomas Hardy would depict and lament the situation of the rapid disintegration of rural communities and their ancient customs, which came about when country folk were thrown off the land. In Hardy's novels, it is common to see people walking the country roads in search of seasonal employment and habitation. Yet this process began much earlier...

Poetry and Tradition

Yesterday I gave a talk on 'Kathleen Raine and Tradition' at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3, with my colleague Claire Tardieu, who wrote her thesis on the poet in the 1980s. A big thank you to the Atelier Poem, chaired by Sarah Montin, who welcomed us so warmly.

John Clare: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’

A little difficult to find a moment to post something! But as we will soon be looking at Romantic poetry in class, John Clare came to mind this evening. He is a truly great poet in the Romantic tradition, lesser known unfortunately. A man of little formal education, and humble peasant origins, he lived in the time of England’s brutal Enclosures, a ‘land grab’ by the wealthy, confiscating the open Common Land of the people of England, and leaving it in the hands of exploitative private owners. This was a traumatic experience for hundreds of thousands of country folk at the end of the eighteenth century, as they were thrown off their ancestral land, or forced to pay extortionate rents. And one which John Clare, with his poetic hypersensitivity, never got over. It had a deep and terrible effect on this man, who as a boy enjoyed roaming the free open spaces around his village which were now enclosed by fences and hedges. We all surely have an innate sense that this Earth is for us all to share; we look up at the wide open sky, and take in the magnificent views of our countrysides, and the heart leaps in freedom and the knowledge that this is no-one's and everyone's: ‘its only bondage was the circling sky...’. 

Poetry and Philosophy

Here is an excellent essay (click on the link below) written by my friend Joseph Milne, Honorary Lecturer at the University of Kent.

With great clarity, he explores the distinctive characteristics of poetry and philosophy, the inherent tensions between them, and how they complement each other as modes of knowing.

Insurgent poets

Thank you Cécile and Stephan, for your very interesting contributions! (see comments on the Poe post below).  I’ll put a reply here. I’m not sure what Poe means by placing this story within his story. What is clear, as you have said, is that the creation of the painting has been brought about at the expense of its subject and, I would say, through the disconnection of the artist from his source of inspiration. Is Poe saying this is the nature of art itself, that it is a danger to our relationship to reality at the same time as being a representation of it ?

Poe’s imaginative world is in many ways close to Baudelaire’s. As was said in a previous post, Nature in its broadest sense, the phenomenal world, from being a place of succour for the Romantic, and in much traditional Western art before the modern age, a reflection of spirtual presence, even a theophany, has become ‘sublimated’ into an imaginative world. This imaginative world in Baudelaire becomes ‘artificial’, a place of refuge from a reality perhaps too difficult to bear, or at least too grey and one-dimensional, a place of disenchantment. In this sense, finding le fleur in or from le mal is the act of sublimating what is ugly, sinister, bleak, into a new creation - as Poe does in this story, through his description of the castle and the telling of the tale within the tale. It is an act which fails in the incipit of The Fall of the House of Usher. The narrator, facing the terrible house at the beginning of the story hopes, ‘It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression’. But the small lake in front of it only reflects back, inverted, the same horror.