By David Gosselin July 8, 2023, marked the 201st anniversary of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley’s tragic drowning in the Bay of Lerici, Italy, at the age of 31. However, before he died Shelley left the world with one of the most impassioned and timeless defences of poetry ever composed. At a time in which Western…
Tag: Poetry
Geoffrey Chaucer and Cultural Confidence
By Gerald Therrien Have you ever thought about where the English language, that we speak today, came from? In school, we were told that there was some indigenous Celtic language, and when the Romans invaded, the Celtic got mixed in with the Latin. And when the Romans left, the Angles and Saxons invaded, and some…
C.S. Lewis’ “Weight of Glory”: Longing in the Poets, Composers & Theologians
By David Gosselin C.S. Lewis famously discussed the role of an eternal “longing” found in each mortal human being. Lewis referred to this longing using a specific German word, “Sehnsucht.” For Lewis, the longing for a something in the distance and an awareness of its unattainability within this world lay at the heart of man’s…
Profiles in Poetry: Friedrich Schiller
By David Gosselin “Trust me, the fountain of youth, it is no fable. It is running Truly and always. Ye ask, where? In poetical art.” – Friedrich Schiller, The Fountain of Youth Friedrich Schiller was born on November 10th, 1759 in Marbach, Württemberg. He was without question one of the greatest poets and dramatists to…
Cervantes and His Age: Don Quixote and a Spain in Crisis
For this lecture from the Rising Tide Foundation Symposium “Storytelling, Mythmaking, and the Shaping of Universal History” Adam Sedia will go over the relevance of Cervantes’s “Don Quixote” for today. Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote is commonly considered the first modern novel. It certainly is one of the most beloved — it has more translations…
Clarity vs. Obscurity I: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared
By Adam Sedia Classical and modern poetry are inarguably different. Indeed, modernism’s chief boast is its break with classicism and tradition more broadly. The difference is palpable in even the most cursory reading of a classical poem alongside a modernist one. Yet in what does the difference lie? It might be tempting to follow Justice…
Clarity vs. Obscurity II: The Essences of Classicism and Modernism Compared
By Adam Sedia For Part I to this series click here. In my last essay, I discussed the difference between classical and modernist poetry as a difference of worldviews. Classicism views the art as a vehicle to reveal universal truths, while modernism denies such truths and instead views the primary purpose of poetry as inducing…
Spenser and Marlowe – God’s Spies
By Gerald Therrien “Come, let’s away to prison:We two alone will sing like birds i’ the cage:When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down,And ask of thee forgiveness: so we’ll live,And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laughAt gilded butterflies, and hear poor roguesTalk of court news; and we’ll talk with them…
Art, Metaphor and Epiphany
By David Gosselin The experience of great art is similar to the experience of a great scientific discovery. There is a common sentiment of “epiphany”. It is the strangely familiar feeling of remembering something for the first time, or having our attention fall on something that had been there all along. In both the case…
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…