Sophocles

Perpetrating a Freud on Sophocles and Shakespeare

After tainting Oedipus, Sigmund Freud goes even further in his defaming of virtuous characters in literature, dragging the noble Hamlet through the same ignoble mire of his smutty, sex-obsessed imagination... The ignorant pronounce it Frood, to cavil or applaud. The well-informed pronounce it Froyd, But I pronounce it Fraud. —G.K. Chesterton...

Making and Revealing

Making art is a mode of revealing the world in new ways... For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the opportunity to make a new Catholic culture, not from scratch and not from attempts to...

The World of the Poet

Man, it is often said, cannot jump over his own shadow. The poet—and by "poet" I mean a writer of imaginative works in verse or prose—leaps over the universe... Sicut erat in principio et nunc et semper et in saecula saeculorum. I

Myth, Sacred Story & Epic: Imagination and Making Fictions

A Reflection on Three Questions Concerning the Re-telling of Sacred Stories and of Myths (An Academically Disreputable Inquiry) Questions:

The Enduring Legend of “Antigone”

Antigones, by George Steiner (Clarendon Press, 1984; Oxford Paperback, 1986) Anyone who has reread the Antigone about as often as is profitable for the time being might consider turning to this book. The curious...

Requiem for a Soldier

And yet I seem to know this simple truth: If the bestowing of the famous armor Had rested with Achilles while he lived, To give them as a war-prize to the bravest, No rival then would have filched them from...

Welcome to Colonus: The Theban Plays of Sophocles

Sophocles: The Theban Plays, translated by David R. Slavitt This is the most stripped-down version of the three Theban plays of Sophocles that I have read. As I write, I am surrounded by...