Plunder the Egyptians

In an introductory essay for Homer's epic poem The Iliad, Douglas Wilson makes a fine point about the promises and perils of a Christian who appropriates pagan literature: By God's common grace, the ancient pagans were able to produce literature of unbelievable beauty. That beauty can and should be appreciated. Once understood and appreciated, it may be safely …

Jane Austen’s inscrutability

In his essay for The New Yorker, "How to Misread Jane Austen," Louis Menand, a professor of English at Harvard University and literary critic, writes: “What would Jane Austen say?” is a fun game to play, but the truth is that we have no idea. For a writer of her renown, the biographical record is unusually thin. …

James Joyce, Dubliners

Don't you think there is a certain resemblance between the mystery of the Mass and what I'm trying to do? I mean I am trying . . . to give people some kind of intellectual pleasure or spiritual enjoyment by converting the bread of everyday life into something that has a permanent life of its …

T. S. Eliot on literary license

In T. S. Eliot's 1920 essay on the 16th century English dramatist Philip Massinger, he famously writes: One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something …

The Plague by Albert Camus

I invited Matthew Jordan, a friend and former student, to join everyone else, it seems, in reading Albert Camus' The Plague (1947), a novel with prescient warning and penetrating insight for our time of coronavirus. The Plague is what I call existentially urgent reading. Here is a description from the publisher: A haunting tale of human resilience …

Beatification of Jane Austen

David Goodhew, a visiting fellow of St. Johns College, Durham University and vicar of St. Barnabas Church, Middlesbrough, makes a case for why Anglicans should beatify Jane Austen. Here is his conclusion: Yes, formal beatification is not the Anglican way; but informal beatification happens all the time in our tradition. Anglicans lionize the faith of …

Plague literature

Never once did I think I would read plague literature under the foolish assumption that such things do not occur in the modern world, which Albert Camus satirizes in his novel The Plague. Here is the exchange between two doctors who are confronting a new and deadly form of bacillus in the port town of Oran, Algeria: …

Lack of imagination renders poetry unintelligible

When my students complain, with lugubrious sighs, "Poetry is sooo hard!", I empathize. Superior poetry proves hard to read; anyone who says otherwise is a liar. And yet, "Nothing in this world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty," as Theodore Roosevelt once said in an address, "American Ideals in …

The Second Coming by Walker Percy

Last year I read and blogged on Walker Percy's novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), with my friend Bryce. Here is a description by the publisher: Will Barrett is the last gentleman, a twenty-five year old wanderer from the South living in New York City with no plans for the future and detached from his past. The purchase …

Three or four things that Americans will be known for

Years ago I watched Ken Burns' masterful documentary miniseries Jazz (2001), and now I am watching it again, this time listening to the music featured in the episodes. The essayist Gerald Early told the filmmaker that "when they study our civilization two thousand years from now, there will only be three things that Americans will be …