In this lecture, Cynthia Chung discusses whether there is a purpose to tragedy beyond merely being tragic and whether this was the intention of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Along with a study of the play, two performances are compared and juxtaposed to determine what Shakespeare intended for his audience. Featured Cover Image: “Hamlet’s Vision” by Pedro Americo
Tag: Poetry
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…
JFK’s Defense of the Poetic Principle: The Artist as the Unacknowledged Legislator of Society
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,…
Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Fight for an American Classical Renaissance
In this lecture by Magdalena Therrien, she will discuss the life and inspiration that is Paul Laurence Dunbar, who became the acknowledged “poet laureate of the African American people,” while living throughout a politically tumultuous time, when the old South fought a battle to restore the old “Slavocracy” in alliance with Wall Street and abolish…
Lessons from a Grecian Urn Part Two: The Paradox of the “One” and the “Many”
By David Gosselin This is Part 2 to the series on Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”. Part 1 can be found here. Chapter II: What is Poetry? The yearning for harmony and perfection is an innately human desire. What else can satisfy this thirst for perfection, if not art? Even nature, in its infinite…
An Introduction to Friedrich Schiller: Theater Considered as a Moral Institution
by Cynthia Chung I know of only one secret to guarding man against depravity, and that is: to arm his heart against weakness. – Friedrich Schiller’s Theater Considered as a Moral Institution As within any period of time, the question is repeatedly asked “What is the Role of the Artist?” That is, what is the…
The Key to Unlocking the Secret of Poe’s Mellonta Tauta
By Gerald Therrien Today, when we think of Edgar Allan Poe, we think of the writer of wild and fantastic tales, and of stories of that brilliant detective, C. Auguste Dupin (the anti-Sherlock-Holmes), and of wonderful poems, like The Raven, The Bells and El Dorado. But we should also think of a young man (following…
Lessons from a Grecian Urn Part One: Truth and Beauty in Art
By David Gosselin An object is perfect, when everything manifold in it accords with the unity of its concept; it is beautiful, when its perfection appears as nature. The beauty increases, when the perfection becomes more complex and the nature suffers nothing thereby; for the task of freedom becomes more difficult with the increasing number…
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…
A Dialogue Between Tagore and Einstein on the Nature of Reality
On July 14 1930, an incredible platonic dialogue occured in Berlin between two great minds representing both cultures and fields of study which many have falsely presumed to be polar opposites of each other. On the one hand the scientist Albert Einstein, representing western civilization, had attained some of the greatest accomplishments by revolutionizing humanity’s…