The Calvinist International
Last week I posted a Christmas poem by Geerhardus Vos. That, however, was not the only such poem he wrote. The second poem in an earlier volume of verse, called Charis (1931), bears the same title as the poem in the previous post: “Nativity.” Like the later poem, this earlier one focuses a good amount […]
Herewith another Christmas poem by another American Presbyterian: this time a man named Louis F. Benson (1855-1930), whose memory has mostly faded away. Benson was a Philadelphian who went to Penn, then was a lawyer, then a Presbyterian minister in Germantown, PA, and then a writer, as well as an editor at the Presbyterian Board […]
While we’re on the subject of Christmas: I noted in my most recent post that Geerhardus Vos fancied himself something of a poet; at the link you can see his poem on Christ’s Nativity. Vos was not unique in this predilection. One of his Princeton colleagues, B.B. Warfield, also wrote a number of poems, and […]
On August 1, 1537, Philip Melanchthon wrote a letter to the Lutheran poet Eobanus Hessus intended to serve as prefatory material for his versification of the Psalter, the Psalterium Davidis carmine redditum (David’s Psalter Rendered in Verse), in which Hessus put all 150 Psalms into Latin elegiac couplets. (Martin Luther wrote a letter to Hessus […]
George Buchanan was perhaps the finest Latin poet to write after the close of antiquity. I’ve discussed him previously here, here, and here. One of his most-loved works in verse is his Poetic paraphrase of the Psalms of David (Psalmorum Davidis paraphrasis poetica), the first complete edition of which appeared in 1565/6, the first edition […]
The folks over at Sententiae Antiquae recently posted a passage worth reading from a letter of Benjamin Rush to Ashbel Green from 1807. Therein Rush says: No more Latin should be learned in these schools than is necessary to translate that language into English, and no more Greek than is necessary to read the Greek Testament. […]
As we’ve already seen, the first two poets W.H. Auden mentions in his literary catalog in New Year Letter, Dante and William Blake, are both included in the syllabus for the course he taught at the University of Michigan in 1941. The same is true of the third, Arthur Rimbaud, whose prose work A Season in Hell […]
The next writer in Auden’s judgmental catalog of poets is William Blake. Like Dante and his Commedia, Blake was included in the syllabus of the literature course Auden taught at the University of Michigan the year after he wrote New Year Letter, “Fate and the Individual in European Literature” (the Blake text included is The Marriage of Heaven […]
This is for the philistines, to help you get in touch with your inner non-philistine and slay the Goliath within you. Dare to be a David! Name-checking one’s literary influences has a long pedigree. One might mention Ennius’ Pythagorean dream in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him and told him that his soul […]
Yesterday we saw that Kierkegaard distinguished between a genius and an apostle via the following kinds of binaries: immanence vs. transcendence; inborn talent vs. the exterior call; aesthetic vs. authoritative appeal. A different model of authority that presents some problems for that of Kierkegaard is the one used by Greek and Roman poets, who both […]