For several months after his 1939 immigration to the United States, W.H. Auden (1907-1973) remained enchanted with all the old dogmas—psychology, Marxism, and liberal humanism—that had shaped so much of his early work. As a poet, he continued to assert his faith in man’s ability to save civilization from ruin. Composed like all mankind [...]
“Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends” is the epistolary record of Flannery O’Connor’s other life, the life lived behind the printed page in small-town Georgia. This life is not nearly as “large and startling” as her fiction, but it is unforgettable all the same. Good Things Out [...]
The art of loving might look like a bard’s Familiar ballad, playful yet precise— All fingers dancing, never strained by self Or hesitation, fret to joyful fret, A perfect, reckless, troubadour’s delight, Like friends who wonder at the firmament’s Vast steadiness, how it remains the same, Yet never ceases to draw our eyes up. [...]
In 1954, “Lucky Jim” was a new planet: When Kingsley Amis wrote it, English satirical fiction had been for a third of a century a decidedly mandarin and highbrow business. Unlike his predecessors, Amis depicts representatives of the lower orders and the previously inaccessible university world that is not so much a garden of [...]
As we attempt to understand Marianne Moore’s baseball poems, it is important to see the contextual influence of her brother and their mutual interest in Pauline Christianity, a tradition they never abandoned. There is some mystery in the space between sport and religion that many Christian athletes inhabit and of which Marianne Moore is [...]
I The Dog-Star’s and the Lion’s days Oppress with more than searing rays: Fear grips the land, her demons gnaw, Loosed in a frenzied craze Now made the only law. […]
Despite all efforts to cancel good sense, common decency, a real sense of justice, respect for the law, and fear of God, these things will reassert themselves, as will the gifts of faith, hope, and charity. What better summer reading for an age of martyrs than the great works of the Western tradition that [...]
‘You may say this to Théoden son of Thengel: open war lies before him, with Sauron or against him. None may live now as they have lived, and few shall keep what they call their own. —J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings ‘Ware, ‘ware! in the watches of the night; for the devil reigns in darkness [...]
Written in the shadow of the Second World War, Ernst Jünger’s “The Forest Passage” reimagines the forest as a symbol of freedom in an age where the “Leviathan,” or all-encompassing totalitarian state, threatens to encroach on liberty and free space. Yet as long as the “forest rebel” has access to the domains of art, [...]
Sam Mendes’ appropriation of baptismal imagery allows the film “1917” to achieve the rare feat of portraying the First World War in terms of hope and rebirth rather than merely of pity and death. As we watch the protagonist Schofield’s journey, we recall that we have been buried and raised with Christ. I was [...]
For Joseph Conrad, the struggle between good and evil in the human soul was a permanent reality, a reality one might prefer to avoid, or try to sublimate, but one that nobody who has lived long can absolutely deny. Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision, by George A. Panichas (165 pages, Mercer University Press, 2005) [...]
Our literature choices shouldn’t be confined by categories and comparison. We should consider what sustains us, what brings life and hope, what bears fruit in us. Literature can inspire virtue and dispel fear, and Francesco Petrarch would call us to absorb the “precious treasure of learning” through a full feast of literature. As Petrarch [...]
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated [...]
In Ray Bradbury’s understanding, the government might very well be wicked and evil, but it would always follow the lead of the Masses and become their tool, rather than the other way around. I’ve been reading the works of Ray Bradbury since grade school. Probably like many of my generation, I was introduced to [...]