Category: Free Content

Rochester was a Restoration rake, suicidal in his excesses, and excessive in his cynicism.  Much of his thought consists of the fag-ends of the French literature he picked up during the nightmare years of the regicidal commonwealth.  His deathbed conversion has done little to improve his general reputation, but I am tempted to compare him with other poets of despairing disbelief, Baudelaire and Lou Reed.  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, might have said of himself, one of Lou Reed’s lines: “Some kinds of love are mistaken for vision.”  Please don’t go looking for the source of the line, because decent people should be offended.

Whether it is merely a temporary aberration, a ray of hope, or purely a method of getting new music (that might actually be performed) published, a number of composers over the last decades have returned to some semblance of tonality and melody. Few things divert my mind and heart from the ugliness of current politics and popular culture better than the beauty of creation during high summer or excellent music. These two poems, on summery themes, and the musical settings of them I have selected may momentarily lift you from the drudgery.  Gwyneth Walker is a Vermont composer who resides...

In his novel Les déracinés (1897), Barrès chronicled the adventures of a group of boys at his own lycée in Nancy.  Their philosophy teacher, brilliant and ruthless, instills in them vast, almost Napoleonic ambitions to put their talents into the service of the ongoing revolutionary liberal tradition.  This is a late reflection of the tradition of Romantic heroism that usually ends disastrously in fiction.  Remember Julien Sorel?  Raskolnikov?   What happens to the boys in Paris is the subject of the novel.  Some become dissolute; others are reduced to poverty; but all begin to collaborate on a journal of the...

From the Christian and ethical perspective, however, freedom is essentially a moral and spiritual condition . Political and economic freedom, if it means simply that a man as the right to choose Burger King over MacDonald’s, Taylor Swift over Lady Gaga, or even a female over a male wife, amounts to very little