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.
Tag: poetry
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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…)
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1,746 words
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…)
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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.
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3,323 words
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…)
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1,492 words
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…)
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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…)
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March 12, 2020 Margot Metroland
Approaching D’Annunzio
1,284 words
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…)
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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…)
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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…)
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3,063 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.
- William Pierce, “Rudyard Kipling: The White Man’s Poet” (French translation here)
- Andrew Hamilton, “Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Burden of Jerusalem’”
- Margot Metroland, “The Conundrum of the Kipling: Rudyard Kipling, 1865–1936”
- William Solniger, “The White Man’s Burden, 2013”
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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…)
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November 11, 2019 Fenek Solère
The Unknown Soldier:
Geoffrey Bache Smith, Tolkien’s Inspiration1,432 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!