Many know of John F. Kennedy as a great patriot and world citizen. Too many however are unaware of Kennedy’s profound understanding of the purpose of poetry in the moral education of society. Describing his understanding of the mind of Leonardo Davinci during a worldwide tour of the Mona Lisa, the young president said: “Today,…
Category: Poetry
The Poetic Principle as a Force of Universal History
In this Rising Tide Foundation lecture, Gerald Therrien addresses the question of morality’s relationship with creative genius and how this uniquely human power allows us to translate discoveries of human nature and the universe into new forms of action and artistry that both elevates our culture while extending the influence of a mortal life infinitely…
Dante’s Commedia, or How to Escape a Modern Inferno
By David Gosselin This is the accompanying article to a lecture given by the same author, as part of the RTF Lecture Series “The Renaissance Principle Across the Ages“. Many today would consider Dante Alighieri a “Dead White European Male” of dubious relevancy. However, Dante is in fact alive and well, as are so many…
Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic? Part Three
By Gerald Therrien At the end of part 2 of ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’, we came upon the proposition that poets either must be ‘possessed and insane’ and derive their inspiration from some divine influence – like the oracles and prophecies of the priests and priestesses of the gods, or that poets…
Clarity vs. Obscurity V: Eliot’s Masks
By Adam Sedia Click here for Part I, Part II, Part III , and Part IV to this series. T.S. Eliot means many things to many different people. Like Yeats he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the academy he numbers among the titans of twentieth-century poetry, with The Waste Land hailed as the epic of our…
Towards An Age of Creative Reason Symposium
To register for upcoming RTF lecture series, please contact info@risingtidefoundation.net Today, perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are experiencing a divide between what is considered to be the “domain” or “confinement” of art as wholly separate from the domain of “politics.” The irony of such a perception is its failure to…
The Power of Metaphor
By David Gosselin Metaphor should not be approached as some “thing,” but as a transformative power, the invisible process by which “things” come into being. Using metaphor, even very simple language and very common-place images can be brought into new, unique constellations. Contrary to the sundry definitions of metaphor proffered by many school teachers and…
Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic? Part Two
By Gerald Therrien At the end of the article – ‘Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic’ – we saw that reason obliged us to ban poetry from our republic, and that reason can admit poetry into our republic, but that it is our job to become the defenders of poetry, to keep it the…
Why the Poetic Principle is Imperative for Statecraft
Cynthia Chung Today, perhaps more so than at any time in history, we are experiencing a divide between what is considered to be the “domain” or “confinement” of art as wholly separate from the domain of “politics.” The irony of such a perception is its failure to recognise that the root of our political system…
Shall We Allow Poets in the Republic?
By Gerald Therrien Much has been written and read about Plato banning poets from the republic – why would he do that? The poet, John Milton, wrote a humorous and ironic poem, ‘On the Platonic Idea as it Was Understood by Aristotle’, that ends – ‘… Ah, Plato, unfading glory of the Academe,If you were…
