One thing email and texting has done is almost eliminate the old-fashioned letter. And letters were the stuff of biographers and historians. Example: we know a lot about poets like T.S. Eliot because of the letters he wrote. Another example: Robert Frost. Ben Myers, writing for Portico, looks at Frost’s letters and asks, “Did Robert Frost Despair for His Soul?”
In 1825, a hero of the America Revolution, the Marquis de Lafayette, retuned to America for a visit. He survived the French Revolution, which didn’t treat aristocrats kindly, because the American Revolution and the role he played made him a national hero in France as well. Fifty years later, he came back, and the return was a triumph.
I mentioned to my wife the other day that if an art museum wants a successful exhibition, then make it about the Impressionists. There’s one at the St. Louis Art Museum opening Oct. 17 about “Women Impressionists and the Land.” And the new major show at London’s National Gallery is “Renoir and Love,” and Alexandra Wilson at Engelberg Ideas has a report.
More Good Reads
Writing and Literature
Explaining Wendell Berry – Doug Sikkema at Comment Magazine.
Cormac McCarthy’s Desert Wanderings – Michael Crews at Portico.
Tolstoy’s Path Out of Skepticism – Marc Sims at Mere Orthodoxy.
America 250
250 Years Ago, a Cannonball Beheaded a Hessian Soldier. Did He Become the Headless Hoseman? – Ryan Thomas LaBee at Military.com.
Life and Culture
Ed Sheeran Proves Trueman Right: We All Live in Marx’s World Now – Tim Challies.
Poetry
A Song Inspired by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – Gunny Markefka at Society of Classical Poets.
What to Remember When Waking – poem by David Whyte.
Philip Larkin by the Book – Dana Gioia at New Verse Review.
“The Base Stealer” and “Pitcher,” poems by Robert Francis – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.
“Disabled,” poem by Wilfred Owen and “She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways,” poem by William Wordsworth – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.
Larkin’s Anthology: An Extract from Dana Gioia’s New Catalogue – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.
British Stuff
Lucinda Douglas-Menzies’ Portraits – Spitalfields Life.
History
‘Hitler was a lazy criminal who slept in until noon’: why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong – Philip Oltermann at The Guardian.
Faith
‘What Is the Meaning of Christian in This American Life?’ – Sarah Rexford at Mere Orthodoxy.
“When You Are Old,” poem by W.B. Years – Read by Cillian Murphy
Painting: Woman Reading, oil on canvas attributed to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot (1796-1875), The New Art Gallery, Walsall, England.
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