The poet’s career doesn’t end once he dies. The soldier’s career arguably does. The poet-soldier, then, has died physically, but what remains of him is his art. Both Edward Thomas and Francis Ledwidge managed to create something that transcended their persons and lasted long after being killed in war. When we think of English [...]
The real tragedy of England’s passing is not that the England we love is a figment of the imagination, but that it is real, in the sense that Platonic forms are real. This real England is present in Old English and Middle English; in Chaucer and Chesterton; in Shakespeare, Austen, and Dickens. England: A [...]
I stand beneath the tree, whose branches shade Thy western window, Chapel of St. John! And hear its leaves repeat their benison On him, whose hand thy stones memorial laid; Then I remember one of whom was said In the world’s darkest hour, “Behold thy son!” […]
The impetuous call to sack Roger Scruton shows those who clamored for the blade of the guillotine to fall on his head for what they are. His sacking also shows the concerted effort to demonize and silence anyone outside the public orthodoxy of thought... Sir Roger Scruton is one of the preeminent conservative intellectuals in [...]
Advocates of the liberal arts include “heretical” books in the great conversation, whereas political liberals seek to silence them as dangerous. As we have seen in Nazi Germany and in communist countries, the banning of “heretical” books ends with the burning of “heretics”… Several years ago, I visited the two-room shack in Tupelo, Mississippi, [...]
As the gulf between classical and postmodern notions of conscience and government grows ever wider and their clashes more explosive, it is high time for the jury to give renewed attention to the nuances of Thomas More’s understanding of the apparently competing, but ultimately harmonious, demands of divine, natural, and human law… In August of 1534 Margaret [...]
Despite their obscurity, The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis were Shakespeare’s best-sellers. But why were these poems so wildly popular? In Shadowplay—her first book about the secret messages in Shakespeare’s plays—Clare Asquith explains what sparked first her imagination and then her research: In the early 1980s she and her husband attended a [...]
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 next time someone tells you that reactionaries and other assorted defenders of the family and private property do not care about the poor, invite them to read G.K. Chesterton’s final words in What’s Wrong with the World… A man of great good cheer, G. K. Chesterton was well known for his sunny disposition [...]
The subtext of YouTuber Richard Vobes’ journeys around England is that what is old, what has stood the test of time, deserves our veneration. In a throw-away culture when we are too distracted, too mesmerized by our technological gadgets to be able to engage in real wonder, Mr. Vobes provides us a means to [...]
The three vows of the Benedictine monk are obedience, stability, and conversion of life. In our own ways, we can follow this example, making it real by paying attention to prayer, cracking the books in solid study, and rolling up our sleeves in the honest, hard work of rebuilding what has fallen into despair [...]
Many moons ago, for this very journal, I wrote an essay entitled “Giving Thanks for Thanksgiving,” offering an Englishman’s perspective on the singularly American feast that ushers in the holiday season. In that article I compared my enthusiasm for Thanksgiving with “my relative indifference to the Fourth of July:” What is an Englishman, living [...]
Joseph Pearce, a hobbit in exile, muses on the Shire. O to be in England Now that April’s there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England—now! [...]
The civic-nationalist view holds that subscribing to the philosophy of the Founding—equality, opportunity, individualism—is the defining trait of the American people. But others argue that it is those uniquely American practices that order the rhythms of life that make us love the United States as our home… This past weekend, there was a wedding [...]