I want a poem as real as an Orange Julius — Charles Bernstein The following essay is excerpted and slightly adapted from The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking (Wiseblood Books, 2015). Most poets in our day have abandoned meter and rhyme, but hold onto the appearance of it, by persisting in breaking up their [...]
While my memories might verge on the edge of fuzzy nostalgia from time to time, I remember quite clearly what the women and men of the 1970s did, said, and believed in small-town American neighborhoods. In those years, I absolutely loved reading (and researching and writing), but I also loved running, biking, and exploring. I [...]
At first glance, there would seem to be much work awaiting the teacher and scholar of language in the twenty-first century. The powers that be are obsessed with the industrial pollution of water, land, and air. The case seems to be clearer, or foggier, for pollution of language. Useful old words are no longer part [...]
Throughout time, our settled norms of political discourse adopt philosophical notions that are simply considered unchallengeable by the majority of humanity. A few hundred years ago, the idea of divine kingship was a well-accepted worldview, alongside the idea that only kings had the right to rule over countries. A few decades ago, it was also widely [...]
“You think, I daresay, that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it! We’re destroying words— scores of them, hundreds of them, every day. We’re cutting the language right down to the bone. Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In [...]
“If the changes that we fear be thus irresistible, what remains but to acquiesce with silence, as in the other insurmountable distresses of humanity? It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated: tongues, like governments, [...]
My wife has just sent me two links showing a linguistic family tree illustrating the relationship of the various modern European and Oriental languages with their Indo-European roots.[1] This use of a tree-metaphor to encapsulate the living traditionalism at the heart of language was one of the imaginative roots of J.R.R. Tolkien’s creation of the tree-like [...]
In the unlikely event that any neo-cons read this, some will pore through the atlas with sound and fury; others will try and reroute the Pacific Fleet; while a few more will summon the 82nd Airborne to drop and rain down mass destruction. But they will be disappointed. The Hendiadys is not a group of [...]
I am not terribly accustomed to attending bilingual masses. I have avoided them rather religiously (sorry) ever since my wife and I went to a Spanish-English mass on Ash Wednesday when she was very pregnant. After well over an hour and a half of hearing each part of the mass said in one language, then repeated [...]
Is Coke’s multilingual Superbowl commercial another milestone in the progressive march toward multiculturalism? With the exception of playing music together from the written page, perhaps nothing permits perfect harmony among men as much as being able to speak the other’s language. That is not to say that we cannot achieve harmony with others absent a [...]
Conservatives have struggled with the problem of adjusting their public posture so as to reflect changes in their situation. Following electoral triumph and the dramatic shift in the temper of their countrymen which produced so many encouraging results at the polls, they have been obliged to represent themselves, through the spoken or the written word, [...]
Christopher Dawson Continuing the theme of language and its importance to the human person, both individually and relationally (see previous essay), let us turn now to Christopher Dawson. The English historian Christopher Dawson (1889-1970), another patron of The Imaginative Conservative, embraced a solidly Aristotelian view of the social world. Aristotle had famously written [...]
In one of the finest books dealing with T.S. Eliot, The Art of Eliot (1949), Helen Gardner attempted to explain the poet’s employment of the language of his day. “Our age, with its undigested technical vocabulary, its misuse of metaphor, and its servitude to cliche, cannot be regarded as propitious for a poet. It is part of [...]
Coventry Patmore Coventry Patmore (1823-1896) was a distinguished English Victorian poet and essayist, well known in his time, who fell into undeserved obscurity during the twentieth century. He published his first small volume of Poems under the influence of Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1844. After receiving a cruel review he tried to destroy the edition, [...]