In his poem “Blood and the Moon,” Yeats writes of “haughtier-headed Burke that proved the state a tree.” Edmund Burke would have relished the line, having proved nothing of the sort. What Burke did in...
In the aftermath of 9/11, the term “civilized nations” suddenly began to be widely used. Of course, everyone had always known that England and France are civilized and that Syria and Rwanda-Burundi are not....
Samuel Johnson’s achievement is so impressive that we tend to forget its very high-risk background. In his maturity, Johnson possessed a regal quality. He had produced his Dictionary of the English Language and been awarded an honorary...
John Dryden
The rise in Dryden’s reputation, commencing a generation or so ago, coincides perfectly with a drastic shift in our taste in poetry, and doubtless with a shift in other kinds of...
Civilization is memory.–Hugh Kenner
I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who made me whatever I am.–G. K. Chesterton The sort of poem that is written in praise of a...
Raphael's School of Athens
In the early twenty-first century the liberal arts curriculum at our universities is in a peculiar condition of uncertainty. No one is willing to say what it should consist...
Christopher Dawson A people that no longer remembers has lost its history and its soul. -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The temples of the gods are the most enduring works of man. -Christopher Dawson The...
