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…
Category: Poetry
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…
Reviving the Memory of Time through Ruins
By Ryan Hamadeh An article I wrote that ponders the significance of Culture. What secrets inhabit this revered term. We use it abundantly in an ill defined way, but up close it reveals secrets which bestow meaning to our most profound perplexion. Countries to have lost their way in bitter war or societies that yearn…
SONG OF THE CRAB NEBULA or “The Shadow of a Magnitude”
By Dan Leach Long before the first eyes ever saw me Floating like a ghost upon the night, Long before human minds even feebly Pierced beyond their dimly shrouded sight, I was there, though clothed in different raiment, Blazing like your own, my brother sun, Over unimagined reaches distant, When your…
Why Shelley Wrote ‘A Defense of Poetry’ and its Relevance for Today
In the wake of the 1815 Congress of Vienna which saw a suffocating cage imposed upon all forms of creative literature, art, and music deemed “insurrectionary” by the oligarchical families then restating their power after two decades of napoleonic wars, it appeared to many that any hopes of a republican spirit in the arts and…
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…
Beyond the Lines: Shelley’s “Ozymandias”
By Adam Sedia Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is one of his shortest works, but also one of his best known, anthologized to the point of ubiquity. But it deserves every bit of the reputation it has gained. Short, yet powerful and descriptive, it illustrates the sonnet at its best. And it is one of the…
On Reviving Plato’s and Shelley’s ‘Enthusiasm’
By Gerry Therrien Here is a transcript of Gerry Therrien lecture as the epilogue to the RTF symposium “Rediscovering the Lost Art of Statecraft.” It is a must see/read! At our Wednesday Evening Reading Club, back in February, we read Michael Billington’s article on ‘The Deconstructionist Assault on China’s Cultural Optimism’, and in the article,…
Aeschylus to Shelley: The Unchaining of Prometheus
The great english poet and dramatist Percy Shelley once famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world” in reference to the role of the Promethean quality of creative reason that has opened up new vistas of potential when all roads appeared dead ends to the masses and uncreative elites. Was Shelley bombastic…
Dante’s Beatrice and The Book of Wisdom
What can be done when a society’s people and political leaders degenerate into near-unredeemable corruption and decadence? Is that society doomed? Or is there a pathway yet available for poetry to intervene and infuse new concepts into the world, without the which said society could not redeem itself? In this RTF lecture delivered by Professor…