“The mind cannot conceive or bring forth its offspring unless it is washed by a vast river of literature.“
-Petronius
Eternal Beauty: Exploring The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia
And Lord, dear cousin,’ said he, ‘doth not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? Do you not see how all things conspire together to make this country a heavenly dwelling? Do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only…
What Can Be Said?
A Note to My Readers Dear Reader, I normally devote this space to the exploration of literature. I have not maintained these pages much during this past year due to personal pressures on my time. I plan to return to active blogging on my more usual themes shortly. However, I feel that the events of…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Stories
“Far-li-mas, therefore, was summoned. He appeared, and the king said: ‘The day has arrived when you must cheer me. Tell me a story.’ ‘The performance is quicker than the command,’ said Far-li-mas, and he began. The king listened to the story; the guests also listened. The king and his guests forgot to drink, forgot to…
A Postmodern Eighteenth-Century Novel: Jacques the Fatalist
We tend to think of experimentation with form and meta-narratives that call attention to their artificiality as the exclusive traits of postmodernism. But if we glance in the rearview mirror of history, we can sometimes find works from the past that also employ these same storytelling strategies. Joe Bray suggests that the eighteenth century is…
Sailing From Byzantium: A Meditation on Encountering History
Once out of nature, I shall never take/ My bodily form from any natural thing,/ But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make/ Of hammered gold and gold enamelling/ To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;/ Or set upon a golden bough to sing/ To lords and ladies of Byzantium/ Of what is past, or passing,…
Is there Anyone Who Does Not Dream?
“Is there anyone who does not dream? Who does not contain worlds unimagined?” -Neil Gaiman, World’s End I’ve been working on a couple of new essays I hope to post soon. Plato’s Earth and Ephrem’s Pearl will explore the value of reading ancient literature. I also take a humorous approach to the issue of meaning in A Hardboiled Literary…
Measure in Everything and Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing shows us the poet at the height of his creative powers. His verse had yet to find that deeper timbre we later hear in Macbeth and King Lear. But as Swinburn expresses it, “for absolute power of composition, faultless balance, and blameless rectitude of design, there is no creation of Shakespeare’s that will bear comparison…
Shall I Project a World? A Meditation on The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon has a reputation as a difficult novelist. If we come to his fictions fresh from the tradition of American Naturalism, we may be lulled by their humorous, jokey tone into a belief that all is most conventional. The writer is obviously just poking a little fun, engaging in a bit of satire. We…
The Rhetorical Kingdom of E.R. Eddison
“But Juss answered and said, ‘Know that not for fame are we come on this journey. Our greatness already shadoweth all the world, as a great cedar tree spreading his shadow in a garden. But the great King of Witchland, practising in darkness in his royal palace of Carce such arts of grammarie and sendings…
Escaping the Dungeon: Addison on Imagination
“A good poet will give the reader a more lively idea of an army or a battle in a description, than if he actually saw them drawn up in squadrons and battalions, or engaged in the confusion of a fight. Our minds should be opened to great conceptions and inflamed with glorious sentiments by what…
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Worlds Imagined 