By David Gosselin The following essay is part two of a series. Click here for part one. Having examined Schiller’s notion of Genius in the last article, it became clear that the wisdom of the “masters” described in his poem was not the kind of knowledge born out of the natural insight and creative intuition…
Tag: Poetry
Towards a Culture of Genius
By David Gosselin In the following poem, Friedrich Schiller turns his thought-poetry towards the question of Genius. The question of what constitutes Genius remains even more elusive in our modern age than it was at the time of Schiller’s writing in the 18th century. In his time, the classical wisdom of previous ages had already…
From the Beautiful to the Sublime: On Schiller’s “The Guides of Life”
By David Gosselin Two kinds of genius may escort you throughout life.True Goodness falls on him who lets them lead as one.Beauty enlivens and makes brief the winding road;Duty and fate grow lighter with her by your side—She leads with gracefulness and laughter to the edge.And there, mortality waits by eternal seas.There, you’ll discover the Sublime—daring and…
Comets Colliding: Schubert & Brahms Set Schiller and Heine
By David Gosselin These are two of the finest examples of German Lieder I’ve encountered. Perhaps no art form has succeeded in uniting poetry and music more effectively than the 19th century tradition of German classical art songs. A careful study of this form of creative expression and dialogue between the greatest poets and musical…
Edgar Allan Poe and the Search for the Supernal
By David Gosselin That little time with lyre and rhymeTo while away—forbidden things!My heart would feel to be a crimeUnless it trembled with the strings. -“Romance,” Edgar Allan Poe Is it possible that much of the world remains captive to a false Poe mythology? Whether in respect to his fiction, prose, or poetry the typical…
Poetry, Art and Civilization Today: Reflections on Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry”
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…
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…