“T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy” by James Matthew Wilson

From the beginning of his poetry and writing career, T.S. Eliot was considered of a similar mind as the poet and cultural critic Matthew Arnold (1822-1888). One of Arnold’s best-known works was Culture and Anarchy (1869), in which he presented culture (and poetry) as the replacement for religion as the bulwark against anarchy.  

However associated they may have been, Eliot spent a great deal of time and effort correcting what he saw as Arnold’s misunderstandings, especially about religion and the idea of culture substituting for it. The poet wasn’t so much in the business of substitution as he or she was in recovering the idea that it wasn’t only the natural that composed the world; it was also the supernatural, and it was the supernatural that had been lost.

 

In the 46-page essay (with 16 pages of notes) T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy, poet and professor James Matthew Wilson explores the similarities and differences between Arnold and Eliot, explains where Eliot sought to correct what he saw as Arnold’s errors, and in the process provides an excellent introduction to Eliot, his poetry, and the thought that lies behind it. Wilson focuses on Eliot’s major poems – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, the poem that made Eliot famous; The Waste Land, which solidified his poetic reputation; The Hollow Men; and Four Quartets, which likely played a major role in Eliot being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

James Matthew Wilson

Wilson, the Cullen Foundation chair in English Literature and the founding director of the MFA program at University of St. Thomas in Houston, is both a poet and a poetry critic. His poems and articles are published in such magazines and journals as The New Criterion, Front Porch Republic, Hudson Review, Raintown Review, The Weekly Standard, Dappled Things, and other literary and political publications. Her serves as poet-in-residence of the Benedict XVI Institute, scholar-in-residence of Aquinas College, editor of Colosseum Books, and poetry editor of Modern Age Magazine. 

He’s published 14 books, including his first full-length poetry collection, Some Permanent Things; The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (2014); The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (2015); and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). The Hanging God: Poems was published in 2018. 

The publisher of Wilson’s monograph, Wiseblood Books, has published several of these essays in affordable editions. The essays cover a variety of authors and topics under the general heading of faith, culture, and literature.

Related:

James Matthew Wilson and The Hanging God.

 

James Matthew Wilson and Some Permanent Things.

 

James Matthew Wilson and The Strangeness of the Good.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

It Didn’t End with Lee’s Surrender at Appomattox, Part 1 and Part II – Tonya McQuade at Emerging Civil War.

 

George Ticknor: The autocrat of Park Street – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative. 

 

Bookish Diversions: The Puzzle of Publishing – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Things Worth Remembering: Allan Bloom on the “Charmed Years of College” – Douglas Murray at The Free Press.

 

The London Data Store – A London Inheritance.

Poets and Poems: James Matthew Wilson and “The Strangeness of the Good”

Reading the poems of James Matthew Wilson leads one to consider the things that matter in life.  It’s an exercise in calming the emotions and quieting the soul. Wilson celebrates the permanent as opposed to the transitory; one learns more about our common humanity by reading “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” from The Canterbury Tales or a play by Shakespeare than any tweet on Twitter, photograph on Instagram, and post on Facebook. The exception may be TikTok, where we can demonstrate our common humanity by illustrating just how ridiculous we’re willing to look. 

What matters to Wilson, as explored in his poetry? Family. Children. Tradition. Heritage. A good name. Faith. Work. Responsibility. The wonder of creation. Even something as mundane as the routines which structure our lives. 

 

All of these ideas and themes are found in his latest poetry collection, The Strangeness of the Good.

 

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

Poets and Poems: James Matthew Wilson and “Some Permanent Things”

For the past four to five years, poetry has been enjoying a significant resurgence. But it is a resurgence only when broadly defined, and that means “when including the internet.” The Guardian recently discussed the rise of a new generation of poets fueling the rise, originating on the internet and especially Instagram. Instagram poets, when they collect and publish their work in print form, can sell tens of thousands of copies. Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey sold almost half a million copies.

Not even Billy Collins sells half a million copies of a poetry book. 

The Guardian article goes on to point out that the Instagram poets have largely bypassed the familiar poetry gatekeepers – the poetry magazines, poetry societies, and academics who often serve as critics. These poets don’t need Poetry Magazineor the Academy of American Poets to help them sell tens of thousands of copies of their poetry books. The old order somewhat sniffs at the transience of the internet, while the new order runs rather merrily all the way to the bank. The resurgence in poetry has barely touched the traditional poets. We haven’t seen this kind of upheaval in poetry since the modernist poets of the 1910s and 1920s upset the then-traditional poetry cart.

All of this was swirling in my head as I read Some Permanent Things by James Matthew Wilson.

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

Poets and Poems: James Matthew Wilson and “The Hanging God”

I found poet and writer James Matthew Wilsonin a short reference on a blog, short but glowing, as in, “You need to read Wilson’s new poetry collection, The Hanging God.” I went looking, found more references, and landed at Amazon. Click.

Wilson is an associate professor of Literature and Religion in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. He’s both a poet and poetry critic. He writes for several publications, many but not all on the conservative side of the political spectrum, unusual because that’s not where you find most poets today. He’s published in The New Criterion, Front Porch Republic, the Hudson Review, the Raintown Review, The Weekly Standard, Dappled Things,and other literary and political journals. 

He’s published eight books, including a poetry collection, Some Permanent Things; The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry(2014); The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking(2015); and The Vision of the Soul: Truth, Goodness, and Beauty in the Western Tradition (2017). 

The Hanging God, published in 2018, is his second collection of poetry.

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