4,994 words
Of peasant ancestry on his father’s side and boasting aristocratic (boyar) maternal roots, the Romanian poet, prose writer, and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) had not put his modest inherited wealth to waste. Educated in the German language since childhood, Eminescu was culturally — if not always geopolitically — an enthusiastic Germanophile. (more…)
Edmund Dulac, “The Buried Moon” from The Red Cross Fairy Book, 1916.
4,430 words
He had me at: “It was still the South, he knew it for a certainty when they passed an aged negro in overalls hobbling down along the highway toward no conceivable destination. The land was cursed. God, he loved it.” [1] Tito Perdue, author of the two novels here reviewed, The Smut Book and Cynosura, is a proud Southerner who has enjoyed skewering the sacred cows of these, our cursed times since he became a writer in the early 1980s. (more…)
1,095 words
Jalal El-Kadali
Oyster Mountain: Poems
Charleston, WV: Nine-Banded Books, 2020
To say that frogs turn
Into princes is blasphemy
Against Nature; Salvador Dali, however
Was a painter who painted the things in his subconscious
The world of his dreams; at least
He didn’t expect anyone to believe that they were real
At least he wasn’t telling lies to children (more…)
413 words
If White Privileges were real
In our hearts and in our homes
Our good-byes would be hellos
And whispers would be bellows
As thoughts distort and form against
the glare of august fellows (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.
Puritan-descended poet Robert Frost in the 1910s, about 40 years old. Even his physiognomy was Yankee.
1,853 words
Discussing Robert Frost’s collection Steeple Bush in the New York Times upon its release in 1947, poet Randall Jarrell devoted the bulk of his review to quoting and summarizing just one poem, “Directive,” saying,
Reading through Frost’s new book one stops for a long time at “Directive. . . .” There are weak places in the poem, but these are nothing . . . (more…)
Simon Marmion, The Eight Phases of the Song of Roland, ca. 15th century.
1,863 words
I sold my car before moving to Europe a few years ago. I had this car for several years and took it on various road trips across the US. During a few of these trips, I thought about The Song of Roland, the French poem from the 11th century. From tales of tragedy to stories of heroism, this epic poem has given me a lot to think about during the various road trips of my life. (more…)
Paul Albert Besnard, The First Morning, 1881.
341 words
Your heart rate dropped precipitously
Like the bottom of my mind at its apogee
The angels were clamoring for your wings
Despite what they say, they are terrible things
Immeasurable for the dread in me
But I love you unspeakably because (more…)
713 words
“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
424 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…)
231 words
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.
Antoni Piotrowski, The Batak Massacre, 1889.
1,784 words
I spent a long summer in Sofia, Bulgaria to explore the area and attend a few heavy metal concerts. During my time there, I took daily walks through the city center where I passed by stray dogs, ancient ruins, and historic monuments. Many of these monuments were dedicated to the countless individuals that lost their lives (more…)
1,746 words
“My favorite singer out of all the British girls that ever were.”
— Robert Plant
I first came across the name Sandy Denny on the liner notes of the classic Led Zeppelin IV. (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.
3,323 words
Owen Barfield
History in English Words
New York: Doubleday & Company, 1926
In the common words we use every day, souls of past races, the thoughts and feelings of individual men stand around us, not dead, but frozen into their attitudes like the courtiers in the garden of the Sleeping Beauty.
— Owen Barfield (more…)
1,492 words
Sometimes the myths and legends of a person overshadow their real characteristics. Yet both aspects are important. Without the real-life person and his actions, the myths and legends of that person would never be created. (more…)
Praça Do Comércio
2,483 words
“John of Gaunt’s speech having shown that patriotic verse can be poetry of a high order, Pessoa in Mensagem showed this still to be true. Most of the poems also go beyond patriotism: those in which King Sebastian figures are metaphors for the religious quest, and those about the ordeals of the seafarers dramatize the poet’s inner perseverance.”
— Jonathan Griffin (Introduction to Mensagem, 2007) (more…)
1,284 words
Reviewing a story collection in 1925, an American critic compared Gabriele d’Annunzio’s influence on the Italian mindset to that of Rudyard Kipling in England. “[T]o understand him is to understand pre-war and immediately post-war Italy.” [1] That sort of remark is almost inaccessible to us today; when we think of the Great War, if we think of the Great War at all, we surely don’t automatically think of Kipling or d’Annunzio. That is one hurdle in approaching d’Annunzio today. (more…)
6,512 words
The idea of “Australianity,” the uniqueness of Australia as a nation and new nationality, has its origins both in the pioneer labor movement and in the novelists, poets, and artists who saw vast possibilities in building a new civilization unencumbered by the decay of the Old World. The first saw their “socialism” in terms of a non-doctrinaire “mateship” that could forge a new “race” called Australians: an amalgam of the sundry peoples that had settled Australia from Europe, (more…)
97 words
Today is the birthday of New Zealand poet, essayist, Social Credit advocate, and social reformer Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn, another Artist of the Right. In honor of his birth, I wish to draw your attention to the following works on this site.
By Fairburn: (more…)
3,063 words
John Collier, Portrait of Rudyard Kipling, circa 1891
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.
1,733 words
There is an old joke that has been variously ascribed to everyone from Leopold von Ranke to Henry Kissinger to the effect that “campus politics are the most vicious of all because the stakes are so low.” Everywhere I go now it seems that campus-style politics predominate. Sure, we face an existential crisis in the West, but to what end? Our enemies now seem more worthy of our pity than of our contempt. Dr. Faust sold his soul to the Devil for unlimited power and Helen of Troy. (more…)
Geoffrey Bache Smith
1,432 words
Dark is the world our fathers left us,
Wearily, greyly the long years flow,
Almost the gloom has hope bereft us,
Far is the high gods’ song and low:
Sombre the crests of mountains lonely,
Leafless, wind-ridden, moan the trees;
Down in the valleys is twilight only.
Twilight over the mourning sea;
Time was when earth was always golden,
Time was when skies were always clear;
Spirits and souls of the heroes olden,
Faint are cries from the darkness, hear!
707 words
“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
382 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
1,561 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 to be consigned to the memory hole. (more…)
438 words
Rust Belt Hotel as Metaphor for America
It’s abandoned, it’s been abandoned for
About half a century now. Once it
Was impressive — vaulted ceilings, tall
Windows surrounded by a polished floor
Of marble, an art deco lobby . . . Bit
By bit, though, it all fell apart. Wall
Dylan Thomas
1,435 words
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
— From Dylan Thomas, “In My Craft and Sullen Art”
Mihai Eminescu
2,285 words
Nineteenth-century Romanian poet and editorialist Mihai Eminescu (1850-1889) studied in Bismarck’s Prussia, where he immersed himself in Schopenhauer and studied under Eugen Dühring. His essays attack liberalism, usury, immigration, and the prospect of Jewish civil rights in Romania. The tone of his philosophically-driven poems, which are modeled after the golden age of German Romantic poetry, ranges from endearing to brutal. Adored in Romania, but without much of a reputation outside of his own country, he was killed by medical malpractice at the age of 39. (more…)