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James Russell Lowell: What Makes a Book “Classic”

29 Wednesday Jun 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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Among My Books, Classic, James Russell Lowell, Literature, poem, Poetry

The whole of Europe during the fifteenth century produced no book which has continued readable, or has become in any sense of the word a classic.

I do not mean that that century has left us no illustrious names, that it was not enriched with some august intellects who kept alive the apostolic succession of thought and speculation, who passed along the still unextinguished torch of intelligence, the lampada vitoe, to those who came after them. But a classic is properly a book which maintains itself by virtue of that happy coalescence of matter and style, that innate and exquisite sympathy between the thought that gives life and the form that consents to every mood of grace and dignity, which can be simple without being vulgar, elevated without being distant, and which is something neither ancient nor modern, always new and incapable of growing old. It is not his Latin which makes Horace cosmopolitan, nor can Beranger’s French prevent his becoming so. No hedge of language however thorny, no dragon-coil of centuries, will keep men away from these true apples of the Hesperides if once they have caught sight or scent of them.

If poems die, it is because there was never true life in them, that is, that true poetic vitality which no depth of thought, no airiness of fancy, no sincerity of feeling, can singly communicate, but which leaps throbbing at touch of that shaping faculty the imagination.

Take Aristotle’s ethics, the scholastic philosophy, the theology of Aquinas, the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, the small politics of a provincial city of the Middle Ages, mix in at will Grecian, Roman, and Christian mythology, and tell me what chance there is to make an immortal poem of such an incongruous mixture. Can these dry bones live? Yes, Dante can create such a soul under these ribs of death that one hundred and fifty editions of his poem shall be called for in these last sixty years, the first half of the sixth century since his death. Accordingly, I am apt to believe that the complaints one sometimes hears of the neglect of our older literature are the regrets of archaeologists rather than of critics. One does not need to advertise the squirrels where the nut-trees are, nor could any amount of lecturing persuade them to spend their teeth on a hollow nut.

James Russell Lowell, Among My Books (Medford, MA: Perseus Digital Library, n.d.), 126–127.

But you alone

30 Monday May 2016

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Literature, poem, Poetry, William Carlos Williams


William Carlos Williams

Trees, from Al Que Quiere! 1917

George Herbert: On Christian Worship in Song

21 Saturday May 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in George Herbert, Music, Uncategorized, Worship

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George Herbert, Hymn, Literature, Music, poem, Poet, Poetry

This is a fascinating poem — which makes a profound point on the importance of singing in Christian worship. First, his poem “A True Hymn” begins with the observation –which any Christian has had– of singing joyfully partial lines and fragments of hymns. (The singer has created series of short phrases which he sings repeatedly):

MY Joy, my Life, my Crown !
My heart was meaning all the day,
Somewhat it fain would say,
And still it runneth muttering up and down
With only this, My Joy, my Life, my Crown !

Herbert tacitly concedes that the few lines are not great, but he then turns around and says “they may take part/Among the best in art”.  What makes the “few words” great is that the words perfectly accord with the soul:

Yet slight not those few words ;
If truly said, they may take part
Among the best in art :
The fineness which a hymn or psalm affords
Is, when the soul unto the lines accord.

Herbert is not saying that the songs of gathered worship should be poorly drafted (Herbert is one of the finest poets of the English language).  He is speaking about the joyful heart spontaneously bursting out lines. I think it would be turning Herbert on his head to argue that he would support poorly written songs as part of gathered worship.

But, we also must not make worship hang solely upon the artistry of the expression:

He who craves all the mind,
And all the soul, and strength, and time,
If the words only rhyme,
Justly complains that somewhat is behind
To make His verse, or write a hymn in kind.

Because, artistry is not alone the true measure of worship:

 

Whereas if the heart be moved,
Although the verse be somewhat scant,
God doth supply the want ;
As when the heart says, sighing to be approved,
“O, could I love !” and stops, God writeth, “Loved.”

An analogy may help here: Imagine two men who each write a letter to a young lady. One man writes without true love, without any actual desire for the woman, but he writes as well as Shakespeare. The second man writes with far less artistry, but he writes as well as his bursting heart can manage. The young lady knows the truth of both men: which man has successfully expressed love?

 

 

 

 

We had rather You shoved off.

14 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature, Uncategorized

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Demoniac, Gadarenes, Jesus, Literature, Matthew 8:28, Matthew viii.28, poem, Poetry, Richard Wilbur

gerasene

Rabbi, we Gadarenes
Are not ascetics; we are fond of wealth and possessions.
Love, as You call it, we obviate by means
Of the planned release of aggressions.

We have deep faith in properity.
Soon, it is hoped, we will reach our full potential.
In the light of our gross product, the practice of charity
Is palpably non-essential.

It is true that we go insane;
That for no good reason we are possessed by devils;
That we suffer, despite the amenities which obtain
At all but the lowest levels.

We shall not, however, resign
Our trust in the high-heaped table and the full trough.
If You cannot cure us without destroying our swine,
We had rather You shoved off.

–Richard Wilbur, Matthew viii.28

Background. Wilbur is referring to the story of Jesus healing a demoniac. The demons leave the man and enter a herd of swine feeding nearby (Jews, of course, were forbidden to eat swine). The swine stampede into the lake and die. The people of the town seem to not care that a monster has returned to being a man. Instead, they are angry that they lost their pigs and blame Jesus.

Matthew 8:28–34 (ESV)

28 And when he came to the other side, to the country of the Gadarenes, two demon-possessed men met him, coming out of the tombs, so fierce that no one could pass that way. 29 And behold, they cried out, “What have you to do with us, O Son of God? Have you come here to torment us before the time?” 30 Now a herd of many pigs was feeding at some distance from them. 31 And the demons begged him, saying, “If you cast us out, send us away into the herd of pigs.” 32 And he said to them, “Go.” So they came out and went into the pigs, and behold, the whole herd rushed down the steep bank into the sea and drowned in the waters. 33 The herdsmen fled, and going into the city they told everything, especially what had happened to the demon-possessed men. 34 And behold, all the city came out to meet Jesus, and when they saw him, they begged him to leave their region.

Those unheard are sweeter

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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John Keats, Literature, Peom, Poetry

ODE ON A GRECIAN URN. 

John Keats

1. Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
 Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
 What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

2.
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

3.
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied, For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

4.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e’er return. 

5.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Perhaps an infinite number of hexagonal galleries

01 Friday May 2015

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Borges, Literature, The Library of Babel

Borges: The Library of Babel

http://libraryofbabel.info/Borges/libraryofbabel.pdf

I have found out your great wound 

30 Thursday Apr 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Animation, Cinema, Film, Franz Kafka, Literature

Franz Kafka animated: http://www.openculture.com/2015/04/four-franz-kafka-animations.html

If you do not know Kafka, you understand very little of world in which we find ourselves. 

I’m Taking a Religious View

07 Tuesday Apr 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Literature

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Culture, James Wood, Literary Criticism, Literature, The Gaurdian

Like all jokes, this covers a contradiction: it stretches piety but stays far short of blasphemy. Could there, I asked Wood, be such a thing as a religious novel – a book that is positively for God, not against him?

“Probably not,” he replied. “I can only think of bad Christian novels, like Graham Greene’s. There are mystical novels – To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway – and in The Brothers Karamazov you have something like the iconostasis in a Russian Orthodox cathedral: certain panels, like those about Father Zossima or the parable of the grand inquisitor, uphold the faith that Dostoevsky undermines elsewhere. Maybe Moby-Dick qualifies too, though at the cost of being undramatic or essayistic or poetic. Perhaps narrative is inherently secular. It corrugates things, bends them too much to stay religious, as Dostoevsky wisely feared. Among contemporaries, Marilynne Robinson comes closest in Gilead, which is about a Congregationalist pastor in Iowa who’s dying – though she has to sacrifice a lot of the novel’s innate comedy and dynamism on the altar of high thought. The novel is a comic form, because it’s about our absurdities and failings. We’re told that Jesus wept, but never that he laughed.”

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/apr/05/critic-james-wood-religious-view-of-fiction

360 Statues

30 Monday Mar 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Culture, Diogenes Laetrius, Ecclesiastes, Literature, Politics, Saddam Hussein, Vanity

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Culture, Diogenes Laertius, Greek History, Greek Translation, Literature, Vanity

Everything is vanity — especially political power. The most absurdly beloved leader can soon find himself chased from town, locked in a prison, bitten by a snake — and his haters using his image for a toilet. Diogenes writes of one Demterius, supreme in Athens from 318-307 B.C.

Demetrius, the son of Phanostratus, was a native of Phalerum. He was a pupil of Theophrastus, but by his speeches in the Athenian assembly he held the chief power in the State for ten years and was decreed 360 bronze statues, most of them representing him either on horseback or else driving a chariot or a pair of horses. And these statues were completed in less than 300 days, so much was he esteemed.

Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, ed. R. D. Hicks 527. However, no political power is permanent, and all history is revisionist. Diogenes continues:

 Yet even this great lamp of Athens was covered by shadow. For certain ones consumed with envy brought a charge of death against his feeble body. But when they could not gain mastery of his body, they belched their poison on his bronze, tearing down them down, throwing them in the sea and cutting up others for latrines. One alone was saved in the Acropolis. (Author’s translation; Greek text and notes below)

He fled to Egypt, where he bet on the wrong children. He advised the king to give the crown to the child of one wife, but the king chose the son of the other wife. When that son came to power he arrested Demetrius. While Demetrius awaited a decision:

 He lived on in deep depression — until one night an asp bit his hand and his life escapes. (Author’s translation; Greek Text and notes below).

Greek Text & Notes: Continue reading →

Lucian of Samosata, Concerning Sacrifices.9

22 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by memoirandremains in Greek Translation, Literature, Lucian of Samosata

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Concerning Sacrifices, Greek Translation, Literature, Lucian of Samosata, New Testament Background

For the previous post in this series, look here: https://memoirandremains.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/lucian-of-samosata-concerning-sacrifices-8/

Then the gods sitting about Zeus

— It’s fitting, I suppose to talk fancy when we go above ….

All of the gods scoping out the earth, looking around and stooping down if perhaps they see a fire winging up or the savor of sacrifical smoke twisting. If there is a sacrifice, they greedily gulp down the smoke and drink the blood from altars … like flies.

When they are at home, nectar and ambrosia is their repast.

It used to be that even humans could eat with them, like Ixion or Tantalus. But those two were uppity and talkative, and now they are being tormented. So heaven has become inaccessible & forbidden to the mortal race.

Greek Text and Notes:

Continue reading →

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