By David Gosselin July 8th marks the date of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfortunate drowning in the Bay of Lerici, Italy. Despite the considerable sea of time that separates us from the age in which Shelley lived, the poet’s significance has by no means diminished. In our age of increasing cultural chaos, aggressive censorship, and rearing…
Tag: Poetry
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…
Shakespeare’s Comedies and a Well Ordered Society
Many of Shakespeare’s comedies present a similar theme. Each begins in a sort of chaos and ends in marriage, which restores the proper order. In contrast, his tragedies have societies that are plagued with chaos and are never reordered with the correct priorities. By investigating some of Shakespeare’s most famous comedies, we will discuss what…
The Poetic Principle in the World of the I Ching: Mankind’s Long Journey to Reason and Beauty
In this lecture Dr. Quan Le focuses on the I Ching, the first Confucian Classic (of five: Yi Jing, Shu Jing, Shi Jing, Chun Qiu and Zhou Li) which magnificently embodies the poetic principle famously outlined by Shelley, centuries later, in his Defense of Poetry which re-asserted that Poets are the true legislators of the world….
For Keats’ 200th Anniversary – Great Odes and the Sublime: Commemorating the Life of John Keats
By Dan Leach When John Keats died in Rome on Feb. 23, 1821, at the age of 25, the world lost one of the greatest poetic geniuses it had ever known, and although much of what would undoubtedly have been his greatest work was unfinished, and as much scattered about in, or only hinted at…
Through Beauty’s Morning-Gate to the Land of Knowledge: RTF Poetry Symposium
“The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, doth glance from Heaven to Earth, from Earth to Heaven; and as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen turns them to shape, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name; such tricks hath strong imagination.” – William Shakespeare (A…
Beyond the Lines : ‘Mending Wall’ – Robert Frost and the Good Neighbor Poetry
by Gerald Therrien [The following is a transcript of the above lecture as part of the RTF symposium “The Role of Art in Shaping a Sovereign Citizenry“.] Mending Wall is a nice poem that also tells a fun little story, about someone, about his neighbor and about a wall. Frost takes this old saying, that…
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…
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…
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…