The Banner of Trust: The Holy Land

By |2024-03-04T19:49:46-06:00March 3rd, 2024|Categories: Catholicism, Christianity, Culture, Poetry, Sainthood|

For nearly two thousand years, the pilgrimage to the Holy Land has been the pinnacle of Christian religious experience and a byword for trust in divine providence. There is one place that captivates the pilgrim more than all the rest. Because in the most consequential of lands, it is the most consequential city this side [...]

“God’s Own Descent”: Dante, the Incarnation, & Frost’s “The Trial by Existence”

By |2024-02-06T19:56:27-06:00February 6th, 2024|Categories: Dante, Literature, Poetry, Robert Frost|

“The Trial by Existence” is an example of Robert Frost’s strong and brilliant reworking of Dante’s poetic tradition in his own work. He incorporates many of Dante’s images, but he also pushes past the ending silence of "Paradiso" by making the incarnate Christ the sight at the top of the mountain. But God's own descent [...]

Swimming Against the Stream

By |2024-01-31T18:51:26-06:00January 31st, 2024|Categories: Books, Catholicism, Christianity, David Deavel, Poetry, Senior Contributors|

Regina Derieva’s life and poetry were filled with the bleak, the absurd, and the painful. But they do not form the last word in either, for God was her friend. Earthly Lexicon: Selected Poems and Prose by Regina Derieva, translated by various (156 pages, Marick Press, 2019) Images in Black, Continuous, by Regina Derieva, translated [...]

Darwin, Bureaucratese, and the Decline of Poetry

By |2024-01-30T19:17:26-06:00January 30th, 2024|Categories: Poetry|

I want to begin by asking a simple question: Why has poetry descended from being a great delight to a miserable bore for the majority of the populace? This was not always the case. Poet Magaret Randall helps us to see: Poems have been smuggled out of prisons, shared on battlefields, passed from hand to [...]

The Hidden Depths in Robert Frost

By |2024-01-28T20:31:55-06:00January 28th, 2024|Categories: Books, Peter Stanlis, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet [...]

A Foray Into Metaphysical Poetry With John Donne

By |2024-01-21T19:11:57-06:00January 21st, 2024|Categories: John Donne, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Something about the way in which metaphysical poetry engages the mind is unique to this style of verse. A combination of relatable simplicity with conceptual eclecticism renders it into a form of expression that can be deeply and personally felt by the reader, but only once he works through the poet’s intricate analogies and “metaphysical” [...]

Nathanael’s Epiphany

By |2024-01-13T21:52:59-06:00January 13th, 2024|Categories: Christianity, Malcolm Guite, Poetry|

The Gospel reading for this second Sunday of Epiphany (John 1:43-51) takes us to one of the most mysterious and beautiful moments in the New Testament. As the disciples begin to gather around Jesus, Philip finds Nathanael and says “We have found him of whom Moses in the Law, and the prophets did write, Jesus [...]

The Other Side of Bleakness: On Winter and the Nativity

By |2023-12-21T12:30:48-06:00December 20th, 2023|Categories: Advent, Christianity, Christmas, Imagination, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

Winter, for many of us, signals the end of the year. It is a time when we reflect on our labor, what we’ve achieved, what we haven’t achieved, what we will do better or make right. But how much of this reflection is focused on the joy and mystery of the Nativity? “Census at [...]

“O Sapientia”: An Advent Antiphon

By |2023-12-17T20:25:08-06:00December 16th, 2023|Categories: Advent, Audio/Video, Christianity, Malcolm Guite, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

The poem I have chosen for December 17th in my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word is my own sonnet “O Sapientia,” the first in a sequence of seven sonnets on the seven great ‘O’ antiphons which I shall be reading to you each day between now and the 23rd of December. You [...]

“Advent 1955”

By |2023-12-10T14:32:25-06:00December 9th, 2023|Categories: Advent, Christmas, Poetry, Timeless Essays|Tags: |

The Advent wind begins to stir With sea-like sounds in our Scotch fir, It's dark at breakfast, dark at tea, And in between we only see Clouds hurrying across the sky And rain-wet roads the wind blows dry And branches bending to the gale Against great skies all silver pale The world seems travelling into [...]

Warfare in Epic Poetry

By |2023-11-30T18:26:47-06:00November 30th, 2023|Categories: Beauty, Civilization, Culture, Heroism, Homer, Iliad, Literature, Poetry, Timeless Essays, War|

A culture that fails to represent, or that misrepresents its wars in all their glory, gravity, and tragedy, is a weaker polity. Epic poetry, with its stark recording of the facts and feelings of war, can give cultures and communities access to the reality of warfare and inscribe its memory on the collective consciousness and [...]

A Mystical Metaphysical: An Introduction to Thomas Traherne

By |2023-11-18T21:55:23-06:00November 18th, 2023|Categories: Dwight Longenecker, Liberal Learning, Poetry, Timeless Essays|

In a world beset by violence, doubt, despair, cynicism and sin to turn to the works of poet Thomas Traherne is to breathe a gust of fresh Spring air. My little sister followed me to England, fell in love with the country, fell in love with an Englishman, and fell in love with the English [...]

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