About Jeffrey Hart

Dr. Hart, Professor Emeritus of English at Dartmouth College, holds a B.A. and Ph.D. from Columbia University and served in U.S. Naval Intelligence during the Korean War. A longtime Senior Editor at National Review, he is the author of The Making of the American Conservative Mind: National Review and Its Times, Acts of Recovery: Essays on Culture and Politics and Smiling through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education.

Edmund Burke & the English Revolution

By |2023-08-15T18:01:08-05:00August 15th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Edmund Burke, Revolution, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

In his “Reflections,” Edmund Burke constructs a powerful myth of English history, defending the consolidated results of the English Revolution of the seventeenth century. 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. [...]

Samuel Johnson as Hero

By |2023-07-30T21:55:06-05:00July 30th, 2023|Categories: Featured, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: , , |

Samuel Johnson’s ultimately victorious sanity derived from a set of axioms that he had derived from his reading in literature, philosophy, history, and theology—having to do with human limitation, self-discipline, the inevitability of the vanity of human wishes, and the psychological power of prayer. Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget [...]

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” & the Good Society

By |2023-07-25T17:03:52-05:00July 25th, 2023|Categories: Community, Conservatism, Culture, Order, Permanent Things, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]

John Dryden: The Politics of Style

By |2023-07-18T14:17:32-05:00July 18th, 2023|Categories: Art, Conservatism, Culture, Order, Poetry, T.S. Eliot, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

John Dryden was, for the most part, a man of quiet temperament; yet he presided over a literary revolution. As a poet and critic he destroyed the principal seventeenth-century literary modes and created the style and the methods that would characterize the eighteenth. The rise in John Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, [...]

Thomas Gray’s Desperate Pastoral

By |2023-07-02T21:08:12-05:00July 2nd, 2023|Categories: England, History, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

In his "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard," 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 [...]

Literature & the Foundations of the West

By |2023-06-21T12:49:41-05:00June 20th, 2023|Categories: Classical Education, Featured, Literature, Timeless Essays, Tradition, Western Civilization, Western Tradition|

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? In the early twenty-first century, the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition [...]

Christopher Dawson & the History We Are Not Told

By |2023-05-25T12:19:06-05:00May 24th, 2023|Categories: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Catholicism, Christendom, Christian Humanism, Christianity, Christopher Dawson, Culture, Featured, History, Timeless Essays|Tags: , |

Christopher Dawson radically revises our sense of the continuity of Western culture. For the ordinary educated consciousness, what happened in Western Europe after the collapse of the Roman order tends to be a blank page labelled “the dark ages.” But as Dawson makes clear, there were heroic continuities, an enormous effort on the part of [...]

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