Paul Krause Follows in Dante's Footsteps

The world’s great poets not only wrote poetry still read and studied today, but they also helped shape the culture of their countries and indeed what we call Western civilization. Consider the greats of Greece and Rome – Homer, Virgil, Ovid and others. The great poets of English include Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Germany has its Goethe. Russia has Pushkin. And Italy has Dante. 

Many others belong to the category of “great poets,” of course, but as poet and author Paul Krause points out in his Dante’s Footsteps: Poems and Reflections of Poetry, it was poets and their works of poetry who led the way in language, culture, and ways of thinking and expression. 

 

One brief example cited by Krause: The word agape is well known in historic Christianity. It is the highest form of love. It is love that is selfless, sacrificial, and unconditional. The word come from the Greek, and it was Homer who first used it and perhaps invented it.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

This Craft of Verse – Alexander Fayne.

 

Putting the Poetry Back into Homer – James Sale at The Epoch Times.

 

“Autumn,” poem by David Baird – Malcolm Guite.

 

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” (excerpt), poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Every Day Poems.

 

Horses Moving on the Snow – poem by David Whyte.

 

“Nativity,” poem by John Donne – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

"On Frost and Eliot" by William Pritchard

William Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger Professor of English, Emeritus, at Amherst College. He received his A.B. degree from Amherst and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University. His teaching has focused on 20^th century poetry and fiction, but’s also taught on Shakespeare and major English writers from the 17^th to the 20^th centuries. 

 

His books include Updike: America’s Man of Letters, English Papers: A Teaching Life, Randall Jarrell: A Literary Life, and Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered. He writes reviews for such newspapers as the Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Times Literary Supplement, and is both an advisory editor and essayist for the Hudson Review. 

Pritchard is, in short, a literary critic. And he’s collected his reviews, articles and essays on the two most influential poets of the 20^th century under the title of On Frost and Eliot. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Dream Song – poem by George MacDonald at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

“October,” poem by Robert Frost – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“The Birthplace,” poem by Robert Frost – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Wendell Berry and "The Mad Farmer Poems”

It was a conversation that went much like you might expect. 

“I don’t understand it,” the executive said. “They hate us. They hate what we do. They don’t even really understand what it is that we do. They don’t understand how important our products are for farmers and for the world’s food supply.”

 

I was sitting in the executive’s office, working with him on a speech he was to give. What he was talking about wasn’t the subject of the speech, but it was clearly on his mind. I listened to what was essentially a rant, and then I asked a question.

 

“Have you read Wendell Berry?”

 

He stared at me. “Who’s that?”

 

And there it was. The animosity about the company’s products, the position of the company in the marketplace, the company’s close identification with “Big Agriculture,” and the executive’s being perplexed with the activists and animosity on social media could all be summed up that that question – “who’s that?”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Adventures in Storytelling – Andrew Motion at The New Statesman.

 

A Woman Was stabbed to Death on a Train. Wikipedia Wants to Erase Her Story – Ashley Rindsberg at The Free Press.

Dana Gioia Defines the Enchantment in Poetry

Dana Gioia may be one of the most productive writers / poets working today. He has six poetry collections, seven essay collections, two translations (Italian and Latin), four opera libretti, 11 books for which he’s served as editor, and a contributor to several collections of essays and poems.  

He came to poetry indirectly – through a 15-year business career. Yes, he quit cold turkey, to focus on poetry and writing. He was associated with New Formalism, which in the 1990s was considered counter cultural (poetry with rhyme and meter, and narrative poetry, were considered rather passe). He was named poet laureate of California. He was chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts; he championed poetry during his tenure. The recipient of numerous awards and recognitions, he’s also received 10 honorary doctorates.

 

In short, Gioia is a presence In American poetry. And he’s in an ideal position to produce a collection of essays entitled Poetry as Enchantment. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Thursday Readings

 

The Norwegian Chesterton: A Brief Introduction to Sigrid Unset – David Deavel at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“Moonlight, Summer Moonlight,” poem by Emily Bronte – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Elderflower – poem by David Whyte.

 

Poets on Translation: Otherwise the Same – Geoffrey Brock at Poetry.

"Out Walking" by John Leax

 

I’ve read Nightwatch, the young adult novel by John Leax (1943-2924), and I’ve read his collection of short essays on writing, Grace is Where I Live and Remembering Jesus: Sonnets and Songs, one of his poetry collections. And now I’ve figuratively walked with him through the woods and fields, called Remnant Acres, near where he lived in upstate New York.

Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World is a collection of essays first published as columns in the Wellsville (NY) Daily Reporter. It is also a collection of poems on the same natural theme, because Leax found that nature spoke of God and faith and sometimes that discovery could only be expressed in poetry.

The subjects of each essay and poem are simple – a dead squirrel, a heron, stones, salamanders, the kitchen garden (and protecting it against the birds and critters), fishing, watching the moon, and more. Yet in simplicity one often finds clarity and truth, and Leax finds it in abundance. What he finds moves him to praise and prayer.

A prayer for order

Father of all creatures,

whose dwelling extends beyond this world,

let no one trivialize your being.

Let your order prevail.

Let your intentions come to be

for creation and for yourself.

Give us, each day, no more than we need,

and forgive us when we take for ourselves

the well being of others,

as we forgive others who seek to take ours.

Lead us away from our dreams of power

that we might be whole,

satisfied in you.

John Leax

It’s not my imagination that in this poem I find echoes of the Lord’s Prayer in the New Testament.

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

Out Walking is a quiet, thoughtful, faithful work, a guide to what the natural order can and should mean. It may be a slim volume (140 pages), but it is packed with insight and truth.

Related:

Grace Is Where I Live by John Leax.

Nightwatch by John Leax.

Some Monday Readings

Darker – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Bone Into Stone: On translating Ovid’s Metamorphosis – Jhumpa Lahiri at The Dial.

Not So Close: Two different looks at Henry David Thoreau – Ashley Barnes at Commonweal.

The Importance of Walking a Battlefield – Doug Crenshaw at Emerging Civil War.

The Inflection Point – Michael Oren at Clarity.

"Grace Is Where I Live" by John Leax

From 1968 to 2009, John Leax (1943-2024) was an English professor and poet-in-residence at Houghton College in New York. He was a poet, an essayist, and the author of one novel, Nightwatch. Leax’s poetry collections include “Reaching into Silence,” “The Task of Adam,” “Sonnets and Songs,” and “Country Labors.” His non-fiction writing and essay collections include “Grace Is Where I Live,” “In Season and Out,” “Standing Ground: A Personal Story of Faith and Environmentalism,” “120 Significant Things Men Should Know…but Never Ask About,” and “Out Walking: Reflections on Our Place in the Natural World.”

I’ve read Nightwatch, which is aimed at young adult audiences. It’s a coming-of-age story, focused on a boy named Mark Baker from his young childhood to his ten years. It’s a good story with an “edge” I haven’t usually seen in young adult books. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Monday Readings

New ones – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

Labour’s war on the countryside: Farmers are being driven off the land – James Rebanks at UnHerd.

Restoring American Culture – Roger Kimball at Imprimis / Hillsdale College.

King Osiwu and a Touch of Murder – Annie Whitehead at Casting Light Upon the Shadow.

Essays: Benjamin Myers on Place, Education, and Poetry

I’ve been trying to recall when, or how, I first ran across the poetry of Benjamin Myers. I read his Elegy for Trains: Poems in early 2014, and if I can clear the cobwebs away from my memory, it may have been through a recommendation of a friend I met at a writing retreat in Texas. However it happened, Elegy for Trains put me on the road to becoming a Ben Myers reader.  

I know why I enjoy his poetry so much: I can’t read it without being reminded of my own family – my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, and cousins on both sides. Family is anchored in the idea of place, and I can’t think of family without thinking of my mother’s tribe of German and Cajuns in New Orleans and my father’s smaller but character-filled family in Shreveport. When I read Black Sunday: Poems by Myers, I found myself reading it two and three times simply because of my own family memories it evoked.

 

Myers, a professor of English and literature at Oklahoma Baptist University, doesn’t only write poetry; he also writes about poetry, about education, and the idea of place. He’s collected his essays and article in Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education & Poetry.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

The Sadbook Collections – Book 2 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Dead Sea Scrolls Trilogy – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

A Sonnet for Candlemas – Malcolm Guite.

 

“Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries,” poem by A.E. Housman – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Mythic Realms" by Bradley Birzer

Hillsdale College history professor Bradley Birzer is a co-founder of The Imaginative Conservative website, which I read daily and have often featured in my weekly Saturday Good Reads. I also read and reviewed his Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West.  

 What I didn’t know was how closely his literary influences (and reading) tracked with my own until I read his newest work, Mythic Realms: The Moral Imagination in Literature & Film. It was almost like reading a list – a long list – of books and writers that I had read myself.

 

Ray Bradbury and his The Illustrated Man and The October Country, and his wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes. Tolkien. George Orwell. Leon Uris and his Mila 18 and Armageddon. Sherlock Holmes. Willa Cather. A biography series on famous Americans (where I, too, first learned about Lewis and Clark). Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot. Pulp fiction. Science fiction writer Arthur Clarke (whose Childhood’s End is one of the best novels of the 20^th century) (in my own opinion). 

 

But the influences don’t story there. His childhood Mecca was the Hutchinson, Kansas, Public Library, 2.4 miles from his home and where his mother allowed him to ride his bike. Mine was the Kenner, Louisiana, Public Library, about 1.5 miles from my home on one of the busiest highways in the New Orleans area at the time and less than a mile from the airport. My mother allowed me to ride my bike there; I had a library card in first grade (just like Birzer). 

 

Bradley Birzer

Mythic Realms is a collection of articles, essays, lectures, and book and film reviews Birzer has written over the years and which have appeared in a variety of publications and venues. While our literary influences are remarkably similar, we diverge on most of the films and television series he covers. That’s likely a reflection of the roughly 15 years difference in our ages. Except for the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Birzer’s cinematic influences and interests reflect the late 1970s, 1980s, and later. Mine reflect the 1960s, early 1970s (like Chinatown) and, at the latest, Chariots of Fire. My television preferences tend to the British productions.

 

Birzer writes with insight and verve. Even in short reviews, he sees things that most of us would miss, like finding national greatness in Cather’s O Pioneers! Or the significant contributions that pulp fiction have made to American literature, and how deeply conservative the tradition of Romanticism actually is. 

 

Birzer holds the Russell Amos Kirk Chair in American Studies and is a professor of history at Hillsdale College in Michigan. He received a B.A. degree from the University of Notre Dame and his Ph.D. degree from Indiana University. He serves on the boards of the Free Enterprise Institute and the Center for Cultural Renewal and is a fellow or scholar with the Foundation for Economic Education, Intercollegiate Studies Institute, The McDonnell Center, and the Center for Economic Personalism. His books include In Defense of Andrew Jackson, Russell Kirk: American Conservative, J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Sanctifying the World: The Augustinian Life and Mind of Christopher Dawson, American Cicero: The Life of Charles Caroll, Neal Peart: Cultural (Re)Percussions, and Beyond Tenebrae: Christian Humanism in the Twilight of the West. 

 

I found myself over and over again in Mythic Realms. I discovered the influence of popular culture. I remembered my own years-long love affair with science fiction. And Birzer reminds us of just how much we share a culture and its films and literature, and why that’s important.  

 

Related:

 

My review of Beyond Tenebrae by Bradley Birzer. 

“The Art of the Commonplace” by Wendell Berry

About 15 years ago, I was having a conversation with a friend who handled issues for an agricultural company. He was doing some handwringing over people’s virtual rejection of the kind of company he worked for. It wasn’t the customers; it was the media, academics, activists, and public interest groups. I told him that he needed to understand and be able to respond to Wendell Berry if the company was going to succeed long term and win the hearts and minds of people. 

He looked at me like I was crazy. He had never heard of Wendell Berry, and that was a big part of his problem. The agrarian philosophy articulated by Berry, and articulated consistently for several decades, had everything to do with the issues my friend was dealing with. And it’s not like that philosophy wasn’t readily available. Berry has been writing and publishing since the 1960s.

 

His agricultural and agrarian philosophy is a part of a broader system of thought about place, community, stewardship, and faith. He has expressed it in essays, novels, short stories, poetry, speeches and interviews. The agrarian essays have been collected and published as The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Edited byNorman Wirzba, the Gilbert T. Rowe Distinguished Professor of Theology at Duke University, the 21 essays collectively represent the man’s thinking on the land and how it’s used and misused.

 

After reading the collection, it can be said that reading one essay is like reading them all. Not because he is repetitious, for he is never that, but because he is holistic, writing from a unified perspective. (In some cases, he’s speaking, for several of the essays are speeches.) You might disagree with what he says, but he always makes his points with consistency, politeness, and insight into the human character as well as the wiles and strategies of the modern culture. 

 

Wendell Berry

The essays, written from the 1960s to the 1990s, cover a diverse array of subjects, all related to Berry’s agrarian philosophy. These include what he calls “the unsettling of America,” feminism, racism, marriage, health, land, community, conservation, pleasure, the idea of a local economy, energy, eating, and the role of Christianity. His Christian faith informs and infuses his agrarian ideas; he might say there is no difference between his Christian faith and agrarianism. 

 

Berry paints a stark contrast between industrialism, technology, and progress with agrarianism. “Whereas industrialism is a way of though based on monetary capital and technology,” he says, “agrarianism is a way of thought based on land. Agrarianism, furthermore, is a culture at the same time it is an economy. Industrialism is an economy before it is a culture.”

 

What’s fascinating is how Berry ties our understanding of the land into a host of related areas, like the division of roles in marriage, racism, technology and technological progress, and the mentality of exploitation. And he says that the purpose of technological progress is not love of God, family, or country, but money and ease. And right there he pits himself against not only Big Agriculture but also Big Government with its hordes of experts. His assessment of the World Trade Organization, for example, sounds a lot like the assessment by President Trump. 

 

Berry is an important figure in agriculture and America, and the essays in The Art of the Commonplace go far in explaining why. It’s a solid collection, assembled and organized well, and represent the man’s broad thinking on agriculture, land, and people. 

 

Related:

 

My review of Berry’s That Distant Land.

 

Wendell Berry and the Land

 

My review of Berry’s Jayber Crow.

 

Wendell Berry and This Day: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Wendell Berry and Terrapin: Poems at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Wendell Berry’s Our Only World.

Rethinking the Role of the Poet: Essays by Micah Mattix

Is the poet a revolutionary, a radical helping to prod, drive, and lead humanity to create a more just world? The early William Wordsworth seemed to think so. Indeed, the Romantics helped drive an understanding of the role and work of the poet that was different from what had been understood before. 

Literary editor, essayist, and professor Micah Mattix has a different view. “In the classical view,” he writes in The Soul is a Stranger in This World: Essays on Poets and Poetry, “the poet is not a Delphic oracle babbling esoteric lines unintelligible to the uninitiated, not a political mouthpiece of the regime or the revolutionaries, but the companion of the common man, sitting beside him, helping him wrestle with the questions he has, seeking first to understand and give meaningful expression to the problems and experiences and frustrations of life –to hint, suggest, explore, and point towards possible answers.” This poetry, he says, draws together a community and articulates its hopes and fears.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"The Global and American Spirit" by Evan Lanning

It’s rare to find a collection of essays that range intelligently over a broad array of subjects, are easily readable and engaging, and fully hold your interest for 238 pages. That’s what author Evan Lanning has managed to achieve with The Global and American Spirit.

Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine. The Constitution and the Anti-Federalists objections to it. Alexis de Toqueville. The controversy over Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. A fascinating survey of the American novel. How about philosophical perspectives in The Grapes of Wrath? Book reviews. An examination of Tolkien’s ideas. 

Lanning seems comfortable and eminently knowledgeable in the worlds of American history, literature, politics, philosophy, and current events. Here are a few of the standout essays.

“Aristotle and Politics” discusses the Greek philosopher’s ideas on the three associations which serve as the basis of community – the household., the village, and the polis – and how they conflict with socialism (proving there’s nothing new under the sun; ancient Greece had its socialism proponents, too). 

In “Cicero and De Oratore,” Lanning considers that convincing oratory doesn’t necessarily happen because of “rational argument, logical dialog, or elegant and adorned prose.” Convincing oratory happens through appeals to the passions and the emotions.

“Integrity and the Constitution” examines the argument between constitutionalist originalists and those who believe the Constitution should be a “living document.”

“The Jefferson Controversy: When Politics Meet History” views the Jefferson / Sally Hemmings issue through the lens of politics and delves into the actual evidence for Jefferson fathering children by his slave.

“The Continuity and Progress of the American Novel” studies how American literature has been shaped by culture, politics, religion, or some combination of the three. Lanning looks at Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, My Antonia by Willa Cather, The Sun Also Risesby Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, The Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, and Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor. 

“Taking Sides in American History” asks, and answers, questions like, did the Great Society fail? Did rock and roll upend American family and social customs? Was the Americanization of the war in Vietnam inevitable? And should America remain a nation of immigrants?

And there’s much more.

Lanning is a field representative of the Leadership Institute, which provides training for conservatives in campaigns, fundraising, grassroots organizing, youth politics, and communications. He lives in Indiana.

The Global and American Spirit is a collection of insightful, well-written essays that directly and indirectly inform many of our contemporary social, economic, and political issues.

Top photograph by Tom Coe via Unsplash. Used with permission.

"On Reading Well" by Karen Swallow Prior

It was my great blessing to have had excellent English teachers from seventh grade through college. They each had a gift of teaching, but they each also had a passion for what they were teaching. They took me behind the story so that I could see it was a story, yes, but it was also a lesson about life, an inspiration, a pathway of imagination, a structure through which poured ideas, beliefs, assertions, and principles.

And this was fiction I’m talking about.

I saw courage and struggle in The Old Man and the Sea. I found basic ideas of good and evil in Great Expectations and David Copperfield. I learned about pride and ambition in Julius Caesar. I was taught about people and race in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I fought against impossible odds and experienced what it meant to be the odd man out in Don Quixote. And I read in The Canterbury Tales that human nature was the same in the 20^th(and 21^st) century as it was in the 14^th.

My English teachers have an heir. Her name is Karen Swallow Prior. She teaches at Liberty University in Virginia. She’s published several works, including Booked: Literature in the Soul of Me (2012) and Fierce Convictions: The Extraordinary Life of Hannah More, Poet, Reformer, Abolitionist (2014). And she’s just published On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

A Small Volume of Essays, A Larger World of Poetry

In 1916, Oxford University Press published English Critical Essays: Nineteenth Century, selected and edited by Edmund Jones. It was volume 206 in “The World’s Classics.” This kind of series was once common, especially in the 19^th and early 20th centuries in both Britain and North America. The rise of the middle class and the explosion in literacy fueled the printing of sets like “The World’s Greatest Literature,” “The World’s Greatest Speeches,” and similar works.

These kinds of books were also used in high school and college classes. I’ve seen many of similar size and content that bear educational inscriptions. These works include essays, poetry, short stories, and sometime single works like a Shakespeare play.

Jones (1869-1941) was known as something of a pioneering schoolmaster. He was born in Wales, and attended schools there, but went to Oxford for his M.A. degree, which he received in 1894. He was headmaster of the Barmouth Intermediate School from 1894 to 1931, when he retired. He edited a number of books for English grammar schools on art, poetry, this volume of nineteenth century essays, and another volume in the Oxford series on essays of the 1th, 17^th, and 18^th centuries. After his retirement, Jones was a Sunday School teacher – clearly, education was important to him, something to which he dedicated his entire life.

To continue reading, please see my [post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.