187 words
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, and politician, was born on this day in 1865. One of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, Yeats’ life and work straddle the great divide between Romanticism and Modernism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In life and in art, Yeats rejected modern rationalism, materialism, and egalitarianism. He saw them as coarsening and brutalizing.
713 words
Mosely, Yockey, Evola, and Pound:
Their marbles lost, but genius found.
Or perhaps it’s just The System’s guise
To sully, defame, and pathologize
All those eccentric in speech and prose
Who point out the emperors’ lack of clothes.
The price is further loss of mind
Assigned asylum (of the psychiatric kind).
Much simpler to be a moderate today
And buffer liberalism on a ten-year delay. (more…)
2,794 words
Robert N. Taylor was born in 1945 and grew up in a working-class neighborhood on the south side of Chicago. As a member of both the psychedelic underground as well as the anti-Communist paramilitary organization The Minutemen, Taylor participated directly in the violent social upheavals of the 1960s. In 1969 he started the music group Changes with his cousin, Nicholas Tesluk. After its revival in 1996, the group would go on to become a seminal part of the American apocalyptic folk genre. (more…)
Phil Eiger Newmann, Kipling, 2020.
3,244 words
Nobel Prize-winning poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling was born on this day in 1865. For an introduction to his life and works, see the following articles on this site. (more…)
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“A slave is one who waits for someone else to free him.” — Ezra Pound
One of the ongoing projects of the North American New Right is the recovery of our tradition. One does not have to go too far back before one discovers that every great European thinker and artist is a “Right Wing extremist” by today’s standards.
Aleister Crowley by Charles Krafft
432 words
Aleister Crowley was an English poet, novelist, painter, and mountaineer who is most famous as an occultist, ceremonial magician, and founder of the religion and philosophy of Thelema. But ironically Crowley’s supposed Satanism and Black Magic are far less frightening to most people than his politics. For Aleister Crowley was also a man of the Right.
Roy Campbell
1,562 words
Roy Campbell was a South African poet and essayist. T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Edith Sitwell praised Campbell as one of the best poets of the inter-war period. Unfortunately, his conservatism, Nietzscheanism, and Catholicism, as well as his open contempt for the Bloomsbury set and his participation in the Spanish Civil War on the Fascist side, have led his works being consigned to the memory hole. (more…)
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Thomas Stearns Eliot was one of the 20th century’s most influential poets, as well as an essayist, literary critic, playwright, and publisher. He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, from old New England stock, Eliot emigrated to England in 1914 and was naturalized as a British subject in 1927.
1,798 words
English original here
William Butler Yeats écrivit son plus célèbre poème, « La Seconde Venue », en 1919, à l’époque de la Grande Guerre et de la Révolution bolchevique, quand les choses étaient vraiment en train de « se disloquer », en premier lieu la civilisation européenne. Le titre fait bien sûr allusion à la Seconde Venue du Christ. Mais tel que je le lis, le poème rejette l’idée que la Seconde Venue littérale du Christ soit proche. (more…)
E. E. Cummings
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At the time of his death in 1962, modernist writer E. E. Cummings was the second most widely read poet in the United States after Robert Frost. William Carlos Williams ranked Cummings and Ezra Pound as “beyond doubt the two most distinguished” contemporary American poets. Pound titled his own global selection of poetry of various ages and cultures Confucius to Cummings: An Anthology of Poetry (1964). (more…)
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939
170 words
William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet, playwright, and politician, was born on this day in 1865. One of the greatest literary figures of the 20th century, Yeats’ life and work straddle the great divide between Romanticism and Modernism. He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.
In life and in art, Yeats rejected modern rationalism, materialism, and egalitarianism. He saw them as coarsening and brutalizing.
William Powell Frith (1819-1909), A May Day Celebration (private collection)
6,740 words
Throughout Europe and the United States, the chill mornings and blossoming trees of spring are giving way to summer’s warmth and abundance. As the midway point between spring and summer, the month of May has historically been a season of great importance to the peoples of Europe, a joyful time of sowing, revelry, feasting, and courtship. (more…)