In his "Elegy," Thomas Gray wrote a great, sometimes mystifying and troubling poem, and, where the pastoral impulse is concerned, an admonishing one... No one born after the French Revolution, said the durable Talleyrand, can know how sweet life can be. This sentiment was quoted in his book about Metternich by that unsuspected romantic Henry [...]
The questions for the West have now become: What it is that we should remember and teach? What are the elements of Western civilization that might sustain what is left and reconstruct what has been damaged or destroyed?… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Jeffrey Hart as [...]
In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. What Burke did in the Reflections was to construct a powerful myth of English history, in which England settled down from precedent to [...]
In the aftermath of 9/11, the term “civilized nations” suddenly began to be widely used. Of course, everyone had always known that England and France are civilized and that Syria and Rwanda-Burundi are not. I sense that it was not polite to raise the chasm of difference into consciousness, much less to dwell on [...]
Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget its very high-risk background. In his maturity, Johnson possessed a regal quality. He had produced his Dictionary of the English Language and been awarded an honorary degree by Oxford, from which he had been too poor to graduate. He was famous as the [...]
John Dryden The rise in Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, coincides perfectly with a drastic shift in our taste in poetry, and doubtless with a shift in other kinds of feeling as well. A change of taste in the arts is seldom only that; a shift in style usually [...]
Civilization is memory.–Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.–G. K. Chesterton The sort of poem that is written in praise of a particular place has always been cherished by lovers of literature. “Cooper’s Hill,” “Grongar Hill,” lyrics on rural Devon by [...]
Raphael’s School of Athens In the early twenty-first century the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition of uncertainty. No one is willing to say what it should consist of or what it should accomplish. The auspices, however, may be better than they seem in that we have [...]
Christopher Dawson A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn The temples of the gods are the most enduring works of man. -Christopher Dawson The first impression one has upon opening a book by Christopher Dawson is of what can be called the romance of learning, [...]