The primary responsibility of the young scholar is to an integrity as person—that is, to a fulfillment of his gifts as this person, limited in gifts but sharing with humanity a nature as intellectual soul incarnate… Polonius: “What do you read, my lord?” Hamlet: “Words, words, words.” At this turning of a millennium it [...]
The “Conservative Scholar” of the next century will engage a most formidable responsibility as scholar, as a borrower and lender of truth in the interest of community. He must struggle to recover, to clarify, terms in relation to the reality of existential creation itself: positive law, natural law, person, individual… Polonius: “What do you [...]
How fallen we are, from Dante and Beatrice to John Hinckley and Jodie Foster. “We did the best job with what we had to work with,” the twenty-two-year-old jury foreman said after the unanimous decision that Hinckley was innocent by reason of insanity. And surely that is a conclusion we must come to, examining [...]
It is well to be reminded again and again that, though we like to think ourselves advance agents of such progress, the strategy of gnostic manipulation of being is very ancient. John Milton suggests the point: Satan’s metamorphosis from being the brightest of angels to alienated gnostic—his fall from love through pride and envy [...]
It is possible to imagine a purple cow, but only after one has some experience of “cows” and ”purple.” When one dares to enter the country of other men’s souls in quest of understanding about the nature of virtue, he enters a dangerous world, especially when that world is one fallen or falling to [...]
IV M.E. Bradford The principle underlying the Agrarian-New Critic’s position as literary critic, shared generally in the New Critical movement at large, may be simply put: Some poems are better than other poems. He judges them as things existing in themselves, made by that intellectual creature—man. The problem term, of course, is better, since it commits intellect, [...]
We spoke of much else besides [our business of the day]: of friends and mentors and the tumors of both—their fortunes and misfortunes, their origins and our own; of illustrative stories, many of them drawn from outside the narrow confines of the academy; of adversaries ancient and modern; of our delight in the progress [...]
T.S. Eliot The use of criticism as T.S. Eliot sees that use in his Harvard lectures in 1932-1933 is to discover the degree of a proper accommodation of the poet as a person to his work, in a just judgment of both poet and poem. The judgment is not so limited as [...]
Even “academic” specialization might be recovered as desirable, but desirable as a means to a higher end in service to the body of community, not merely servicing the appetitive order of individuals collectively called society, but in service to the community as a body of members. In that term society the nature of community, [...]
Marion Montgomery The Prophetic Poet and the Spirit of the Age by Marion Montgomery (in three volumes): Why Flannery O’Connor Stayed Home (1981), Why Poe Drank Liquor (1983), Why Hawthorne Was Melancholy (1984) Marion Montgomery’s trilogy is an ambitious, indeed audacious, assessment of the social, political, literary, religions, and philosophical temper of [...]
An essay written by John von Heyking, entitled “Top 5 Books on Liberal Education Published in the Last 35 years” is a good read and moves one to think about the texts that he names. But are there any others? I have read and am familiar with 4 of the 5 named books: I am [...]