The Calvinist International
I’m reading Alan Jacobs’ recent book The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian Humanism in an Age of Crisis. I’m more persuaded by some aspects of it, less so by others, and stimulated by all. I likely will not have time to write up a full review, which would in any case probably be longer than […]
“Natura abhorret a vacuo” Nature abhors a vacuum, and so every people constituted as a political body is going to have a schedule of sacred observances, of holy days–days marked out as special in some way, whether because of their perceived relation to a polity’s foundation or to its preservation. This calendar never has been, […]
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 […]
Prologue. If one is reading a secondary source but also wants to be sure he, you know, knows something, it is advisable to track down primary sources in order to check the veracity of claims made about some figure, text, or whatever. “Trust, but verify,” as the Gipper said. Scene: Someone poring over a book. Reading […]
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 […]
For those who, for whatever reason, don’t like to sing the actual words of the Psalms, metrical psalmody can be a good substitute. But it can also have its difficulties. Probably the best known metrical Psalter in English is the Scottish Metrical Psalter. Anyone who has ever used it knows how torturous and opaque the […]