Thank you for writing and posting this. Bringing this all to modern times we see Antifa and BLM along with other bored, stupid, and hate filled youth destroying art, culture, history, civility, the family, religion, and all of the good parts of Western culture. They should be going after the ruling class, the statists, the corrupt, censorship, but they do not understand who their masters are so they do not go after them. I always appreciate your work.
I read it. It advocates for a "higher law." Nature of course is brutal and sadistic, so such a law cannot emerge from that source, except when Nature produces the rarest intellectual oddities--Shakespeare will serve for an example, who crowned as justice only the kind of law steeped in mercy. Shelley as we know called poets man's unacknowledged legislators. But he knew their authority could only prevail or be helpful in times when genius was given an audience and appreciated. In periods of sharp decline, such as ours, when the arts have fallen to a low level and audiences to the same level, great art can never be part of the picture, except perhaps as unwelcome homework. Today what is desired is the lingo of the masses. Few will be hoping to snag a ticket to a production of Oedipus at Colonus. In North America especially, Mammon rules absolutely, due to the unchalleneged reign of capitalism. What we have here is a concretized plutocracy, wherein only lucre counts. Education is not a concern of anyone, nor is its virtual nonexistence today ever brought up by anybody, no doubt because people are unaware of the colossal swindle education has become. So in short, high culture is currently beyond the common grasp and wholly outside the range of their appetite.
I think the cultural currents are pointing towards a burgeoning desire for high culture by a growing number of people, but especially younger people. Sure, some parts of the culture are beyond salvageable, but that's not new. Of course, that means the usual suspects will play their usual tricks, that is, offering various simulations and simulacra of the real thing to throw people off the trail, or Tao. There is a constant and aggressive imposition of artificial culture from the top down, to trap people in more limited frameworks. That's also not new. And that's precisely why we need a few discerning minds to shed an additionally bright Promethean ray on these tricky matters.
Shelley as you know regarded drama as the gauge of an age's cultural level. He mentions how in Athens, all the arts were combined in plays, those of Sophocles, Aeschylus, etc. to maximize their impact on audiences, to keep them fully enrapt. He regarded that age as mankind's cultural pinnacle. Evidently Athenian youth wre bred to appreciate higher, and grander, expression.
Anyone who can enjoy Shakespeare for example, may be assumed to have acquired--or else been born with--a taste for great language, wit, insight, and high sentiment. Elizabethans still had an ear for those wonders.
I have often thought that if students today were still required to memorize soliloquies and the like, it would raise their standards of expression and thought. Or to memorize fine poetry. Or even the Gettysburg address. Command of speech is a requisite for penetrating thought. Speech is the only medium of thought after all.
I am pretty certain that today, deep acquaintance with fine examples of the literary arts is virtually nonexistent, at best quite rare.
Film could do what Greek drama did, and indeed in its earlier days did do, De Mille's productions for example, which at least as I recall presented stunning combinations of all the arts and aesthetic elements. Film has enormous potential to fascinate, possibly the greatest in history, but is any of that potential being tapped today? I suspect it now only plays to an uneducated audience, and presents nothing but bilge. It plays to the taste modern education has been both indisposed and unable to raise. Modern public education has been allowed to swindle everyone, pupils, parents, and society alike. Thus the ludicrous popularity of movies full of invincible cartoon characters surviving any and every kind of assault. Is even Kryptonite left to endanger their infinite resurrections?
How can Renaissance creations flourish among people to whom such things are wholly alien?
The tide is irreversible I'm afraid. Only some enormous crisis, with its attendant fear, will unplug people's thoroughly cerumenized ears. Where no power of intellectual discrimination any longer exists, no one can distinguish better from worse.
Put not your faith in princes, someone once said. And our modern princes are our politicians. JFK never meant much to me. He seemed too much of a playboy. Oh he made all the right noises. But that's easy. Poets do more than that. And I prefer to put my faith in poets. As I prefer to talk of 'the powers that be' rather than 'oligarchs'. Affecting the Bible slightly more than the Greeks. And I am a wary of conspiracy theories. Nor do I think the Erinnyes have been totally banished from our modern world. And the more delayed karma is the more painful it is. The thing that concerns me is the woeful state of poetry. And the way that a constant smorgasbord of prizes and competitions and other blandishments seek to corrupt poetry and put it in the service of the competitive self-glorifying ego rather than the collaborating and essentially self-effacing muse. Prophets and not profits are what I believe in. How much we need the former. How much I deprecate the latter.
Alas John, in the same way that we can never fully decouple our objective reality from our subjective experience, I think politics, which affects and transforms our objective reality (which has a subjective effect on our psyches and imaginations), so too can poetry never be fully divorced from the world.
Dante’s Commedia was surely not written as a work isolated from the world. Surely the Iliad went far from ignoring it too, even if its emphasis was on the past.
For the same reasons we can’t fully separate the objective from the subjective, we can’t separate poetry from politics. They are eternally wed through dance and feud, perpetually.
We can agree that modern poetry has become uglier as our world has become uglier; at the same time, our world has become uglier as our literature has become uglier, lost its inspiration, and increasingly become consumed in the mire of existentialism and nihilism.
But is this a chicken or the egg kind of question? I don’t think so. But there is a dance involved.
I wouldn’t try to fight it, but instead find the best ways to compliment it in a productive and worthwhile manner.
Shelley very much understood the political world he lived in, as did Keats. Shelley’s last essay was kept private and unpublished for 100 years, “On the Philosophy of Reform.” These poets understood it much more than most of the literary critics who commented on their works understood their own world.
Political messaging in poetry is a no-no of course. But a true poet should know that, such that whatever “political” subject matter they touch rises above “politics.”
We could say the same about Schiller or Poe, to say nothing of Dante (who was an actual diplomat and prior for the City of Florence). Poe’s grandfather was a close associate of the Marquis de Lafayette, actually.
We could go on…
Robert Frost? He even participated in diplomatic overtures during the US-Soviet missile crisis.
Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man were written with the idea that the only way to avoid political disaster and ruin upon ruin was to educate the emotions and cultivate the higher faculties, which was the unique province of art.
Art will always be political, though in a much subtler and indirect manner than most would like or imagine. Ultimately, any true quality of change or intervention into the world requires a certain artfulness and subtlety, whether it be raising children, war, or building a nation. To the degree it doesn’t, there will be problems.
The question is: what is the world lacking? I think, on the highest level poetry looks for ways to answer this. The twist? I think the answer is usually not what people imagined or expected. Hence, the Divine Comedy or Iliads. Hence, poetry… an attempt to express the inexpressible, to make the impossible real.
I'm not totally apolitical. But I tend to reprehend all politicians. And am rather disgusted by the naive idealism that surrounds figures like Kennedy. I just find politicians too crude and too stupid. And too full of unexamined assumptions and too fond of clichés and slogans.
Here in any case I prefer to concentrate on one issue, like education. I simply cannot see how education can be called education until all children are educated together. And that would only be the start. My own experience of education was that it was an exercise in 'dividing and ruling' rather then the required 'uniting and serving' that Christ taught us. And then there were all the lies we were required to swallow.
When it comes to politics I prefer figures like Greta. For whom I've written a longish sequence of poems.
In adolescence I was in the Young Socialists for a while. But quickly became disillusioned. I find the lust for power very boring, as much in myself as in other people. Connectedness I prefer to achieve through my art, since here I can be fully myself. And myself alone. Without having to wear a uniform. Or indeed any clothes whatsoever. I do not 'present myself to the world', or even have to, in the same way that I abandon all that in the company of my family and my closest friends. I am not attempting to put anything over anybody, or preach a message, or have an effect, or to sell myself, or advertise myself. It is pure gift. In the same way that Christ's crucifixion was pure gift. That's my politics.
The last thing I want to do is join anybody's gang or army. In that way I am not even a Christian. Since that would merely get between me and the intensity of my most intimate relationship with Christ. And intimacy is what it's all about.
Apart from that I am myself alone. And my solidarity is me.
I grew up in Montreal and JFK was an ICON figure when we were called into the school auditorium. We were not Americans, we didn't duck and cover, we didn't know what bombs shelters were.
JFK was who we could become if we behaved as he behaved not knowing he was his Father's son.
Sixty years and history is all changed but 3000 years and literature still speaks truth to our madness.
Maybe we are flying too close to the sun.
I know what I suspect but I also suspect it really doesn't matter unless we can change the present.
Does it really matter if Socrates was merely a fiction?
Ozymandias Shelley; Frankenstein Shelly's wife
I was fifteen. I don't remember how I felt about JFK all I remember is that everybody was hurting and that is what really mattered.
Camelot was a Broadway play and I was very very alone.
I lived in my own little world.
Nobody including myself knew who I was but JFK was a complete fiction.
In 1960 I was watching Irving Layton calling for an end to the Cold War.
I can't believe I just read, in a comment below, something about Dante and Shelley and God knows who else. Where have I been all my life, not knowing that this website exists? OK, well it's November 22 (Where were you in '63? I was in a high school cosmetics class when the news came in.) But now I have new news. Last week I went to Arizona to meet a guy whose legal name is David Quigley but who claims to be the real John F Kennedy, Jr. By God, bullseye. It is he. Please read my short article, or at least look at the video of this guy. And he's as nice as pie. Like stuck in a time warp of honesty!!!
The NWO has been controlling the US government in many ways since WW2.
Since the CIA was created they were infiltrated by the KGB. At the time of JFK's murder their chief was KGB and organized several of his comrades to organize the murder. Of course they used a patsy to take the blame.
Later they tried to do the same to LBJ, but their MK ULTRA man was arrested by a police officer who was checking the route for LBJ and found his parked car with a loaded gun on the back seat.
All the cover up and schemes are exposed in "Destroying America the CIA's quest to control the government" by Anthony R. Frank (former secret service officer who uncovered the KGB infiltration by 75 of their agents).
As someone who has gone hunting with real guns, and someone who was in the military and fired
almost every weapon they had at the time, I can honestly say that there is a 95% chance that JFK
was shot from the front and not the back, but that’s just the way I see it.
Thank you for writing and posting this. Bringing this all to modern times we see Antifa and BLM along with other bored, stupid, and hate filled youth destroying art, culture, history, civility, the family, religion, and all of the good parts of Western culture. They should be going after the ruling class, the statists, the corrupt, censorship, but they do not understand who their masters are so they do not go after them. I always appreciate your work.
I read it. It advocates for a "higher law." Nature of course is brutal and sadistic, so such a law cannot emerge from that source, except when Nature produces the rarest intellectual oddities--Shakespeare will serve for an example, who crowned as justice only the kind of law steeped in mercy. Shelley as we know called poets man's unacknowledged legislators. But he knew their authority could only prevail or be helpful in times when genius was given an audience and appreciated. In periods of sharp decline, such as ours, when the arts have fallen to a low level and audiences to the same level, great art can never be part of the picture, except perhaps as unwelcome homework. Today what is desired is the lingo of the masses. Few will be hoping to snag a ticket to a production of Oedipus at Colonus. In North America especially, Mammon rules absolutely, due to the unchalleneged reign of capitalism. What we have here is a concretized plutocracy, wherein only lucre counts. Education is not a concern of anyone, nor is its virtual nonexistence today ever brought up by anybody, no doubt because people are unaware of the colossal swindle education has become. So in short, high culture is currently beyond the common grasp and wholly outside the range of their appetite.
I think the cultural currents are pointing towards a burgeoning desire for high culture by a growing number of people, but especially younger people. Sure, some parts of the culture are beyond salvageable, but that's not new. Of course, that means the usual suspects will play their usual tricks, that is, offering various simulations and simulacra of the real thing to throw people off the trail, or Tao. There is a constant and aggressive imposition of artificial culture from the top down, to trap people in more limited frameworks. That's also not new. And that's precisely why we need a few discerning minds to shed an additionally bright Promethean ray on these tricky matters.
Everything else is detail.
Shelley as you know regarded drama as the gauge of an age's cultural level. He mentions how in Athens, all the arts were combined in plays, those of Sophocles, Aeschylus, etc. to maximize their impact on audiences, to keep them fully enrapt. He regarded that age as mankind's cultural pinnacle. Evidently Athenian youth wre bred to appreciate higher, and grander, expression.
Anyone who can enjoy Shakespeare for example, may be assumed to have acquired--or else been born with--a taste for great language, wit, insight, and high sentiment. Elizabethans still had an ear for those wonders.
I have often thought that if students today were still required to memorize soliloquies and the like, it would raise their standards of expression and thought. Or to memorize fine poetry. Or even the Gettysburg address. Command of speech is a requisite for penetrating thought. Speech is the only medium of thought after all.
I am pretty certain that today, deep acquaintance with fine examples of the literary arts is virtually nonexistent, at best quite rare.
Film could do what Greek drama did, and indeed in its earlier days did do, De Mille's productions for example, which at least as I recall presented stunning combinations of all the arts and aesthetic elements. Film has enormous potential to fascinate, possibly the greatest in history, but is any of that potential being tapped today? I suspect it now only plays to an uneducated audience, and presents nothing but bilge. It plays to the taste modern education has been both indisposed and unable to raise. Modern public education has been allowed to swindle everyone, pupils, parents, and society alike. Thus the ludicrous popularity of movies full of invincible cartoon characters surviving any and every kind of assault. Is even Kryptonite left to endanger their infinite resurrections?
How can Renaissance creations flourish among people to whom such things are wholly alien?
The tide is irreversible I'm afraid. Only some enormous crisis, with its attendant fear, will unplug people's thoroughly cerumenized ears. Where no power of intellectual discrimination any longer exists, no one can distinguish better from worse.
Put not your faith in princes, someone once said. And our modern princes are our politicians. JFK never meant much to me. He seemed too much of a playboy. Oh he made all the right noises. But that's easy. Poets do more than that. And I prefer to put my faith in poets. As I prefer to talk of 'the powers that be' rather than 'oligarchs'. Affecting the Bible slightly more than the Greeks. And I am a wary of conspiracy theories. Nor do I think the Erinnyes have been totally banished from our modern world. And the more delayed karma is the more painful it is. The thing that concerns me is the woeful state of poetry. And the way that a constant smorgasbord of prizes and competitions and other blandishments seek to corrupt poetry and put it in the service of the competitive self-glorifying ego rather than the collaborating and essentially self-effacing muse. Prophets and not profits are what I believe in. How much we need the former. How much I deprecate the latter.
Alas John, in the same way that we can never fully decouple our objective reality from our subjective experience, I think politics, which affects and transforms our objective reality (which has a subjective effect on our psyches and imaginations), so too can poetry never be fully divorced from the world.
Dante’s Commedia was surely not written as a work isolated from the world. Surely the Iliad went far from ignoring it too, even if its emphasis was on the past.
For the same reasons we can’t fully separate the objective from the subjective, we can’t separate poetry from politics. They are eternally wed through dance and feud, perpetually.
We can agree that modern poetry has become uglier as our world has become uglier; at the same time, our world has become uglier as our literature has become uglier, lost its inspiration, and increasingly become consumed in the mire of existentialism and nihilism.
But is this a chicken or the egg kind of question? I don’t think so. But there is a dance involved.
I wouldn’t try to fight it, but instead find the best ways to compliment it in a productive and worthwhile manner.
Shelley very much understood the political world he lived in, as did Keats. Shelley’s last essay was kept private and unpublished for 100 years, “On the Philosophy of Reform.” These poets understood it much more than most of the literary critics who commented on their works understood their own world.
Political messaging in poetry is a no-no of course. But a true poet should know that, such that whatever “political” subject matter they touch rises above “politics.”
We could say the same about Schiller or Poe, to say nothing of Dante (who was an actual diplomat and prior for the City of Florence). Poe’s grandfather was a close associate of the Marquis de Lafayette, actually.
We could go on…
Robert Frost? He even participated in diplomatic overtures during the US-Soviet missile crisis.
Schiller’s Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man were written with the idea that the only way to avoid political disaster and ruin upon ruin was to educate the emotions and cultivate the higher faculties, which was the unique province of art.
Art will always be political, though in a much subtler and indirect manner than most would like or imagine. Ultimately, any true quality of change or intervention into the world requires a certain artfulness and subtlety, whether it be raising children, war, or building a nation. To the degree it doesn’t, there will be problems.
The question is: what is the world lacking? I think, on the highest level poetry looks for ways to answer this. The twist? I think the answer is usually not what people imagined or expected. Hence, the Divine Comedy or Iliads. Hence, poetry… an attempt to express the inexpressible, to make the impossible real.
I'm not totally apolitical. But I tend to reprehend all politicians. And am rather disgusted by the naive idealism that surrounds figures like Kennedy. I just find politicians too crude and too stupid. And too full of unexamined assumptions and too fond of clichés and slogans.
Here in any case I prefer to concentrate on one issue, like education. I simply cannot see how education can be called education until all children are educated together. And that would only be the start. My own experience of education was that it was an exercise in 'dividing and ruling' rather then the required 'uniting and serving' that Christ taught us. And then there were all the lies we were required to swallow.
When it comes to politics I prefer figures like Greta. For whom I've written a longish sequence of poems.
In adolescence I was in the Young Socialists for a while. But quickly became disillusioned. I find the lust for power very boring, as much in myself as in other people. Connectedness I prefer to achieve through my art, since here I can be fully myself. And myself alone. Without having to wear a uniform. Or indeed any clothes whatsoever. I do not 'present myself to the world', or even have to, in the same way that I abandon all that in the company of my family and my closest friends. I am not attempting to put anything over anybody, or preach a message, or have an effect, or to sell myself, or advertise myself. It is pure gift. In the same way that Christ's crucifixion was pure gift. That's my politics.
The last thing I want to do is join anybody's gang or army. In that way I am not even a Christian. Since that would merely get between me and the intensity of my most intimate relationship with Christ. And intimacy is what it's all about.
Apart from that I am myself alone. And my solidarity is me.
I grew up in Montreal and JFK was an ICON figure when we were called into the school auditorium. We were not Americans, we didn't duck and cover, we didn't know what bombs shelters were.
JFK was who we could become if we behaved as he behaved not knowing he was his Father's son.
Sixty years and history is all changed but 3000 years and literature still speaks truth to our madness.
Maybe we are flying too close to the sun.
I know what I suspect but I also suspect it really doesn't matter unless we can change the present.
Does it really matter if Socrates was merely a fiction?
Ozymandias Shelley; Frankenstein Shelly's wife
I was fifteen. I don't remember how I felt about JFK all I remember is that everybody was hurting and that is what really mattered.
Camelot was a Broadway play and I was very very alone.
I lived in my own little world.
Nobody including myself knew who I was but JFK was a complete fiction.
In 1960 I was watching Irving Layton calling for an end to the Cold War.
I didn't know it was all theatre.
I can't believe I just read, in a comment below, something about Dante and Shelley and God knows who else. Where have I been all my life, not knowing that this website exists? OK, well it's November 22 (Where were you in '63? I was in a high school cosmetics class when the news came in.) But now I have new news. Last week I went to Arizona to meet a guy whose legal name is David Quigley but who claims to be the real John F Kennedy, Jr. By God, bullseye. It is he. Please read my short article, or at least look at the video of this guy. And he's as nice as pie. Like stuck in a time warp of honesty!!!
https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=248646
The NWO has been controlling the US government in many ways since WW2.
Since the CIA was created they were infiltrated by the KGB. At the time of JFK's murder their chief was KGB and organized several of his comrades to organize the murder. Of course they used a patsy to take the blame.
Later they tried to do the same to LBJ, but their MK ULTRA man was arrested by a police officer who was checking the route for LBJ and found his parked car with a loaded gun on the back seat.
All the cover up and schemes are exposed in "Destroying America the CIA's quest to control the government" by Anthony R. Frank (former secret service officer who uncovered the KGB infiltration by 75 of their agents).