Chatterton, a late 18th century poet, is more famous as a legend–the teenage poet who died at 17–than as a writer. The Romantics, French as well as English, lionized him. His best known poems are the medievalizing verses he attributed to a 15th century poet, but his talent for painting satiric portraits is evident in “Apostate Will”–a fine sketch of the clergy on the make,
Mankind has got to know its limitations, but from the Tower of Babel to Soviet Union to Woke America, too many men have attempted to build a heaven on earth that turns out to resemble Hell.
Nonetheless…if there is one thing we Americans take seriously, it is money But even on that most vital subject, we cannot bring ourselves to tell the truth.
Men and women have been trying to reason their way into a good life for centuries. Accepting every ideology proposed by the latest crack-brained intellectual, they fall farther and farther away from the moral and political realities required by human nature.
This post is a composite of a series of pieces I did on Sophocles. Religious and skeptical of sophistry, Sophocles was both a profound writer and an Athenian citizen who served his city in war and peace. His works are a warning against intellectual and political arrogance.
The greatest of the philosophes, the Marquis de Sade, took the Enlightenment to the ultimate conclusion. God did not exist; religion and morality were invented to repress mankind; therefore, rape, torture, and multi-sexual orgies were all part of a program for liberating the human spirit from the shackles of Christianity.
These hills are sandy. Trees are dwarfed here. Crows
Caw dismally in skies of an arid brilliance,
Complain in dusty pine-trees. Yellow daybreak
Lights on the long brown slopes a frost-like dew,
Nations make choices, usually unconsciously, though it is too late, when a later generation complains about their teeth being set on edge, to refuse to drink the cup of sour wine that was offered to their fathers.
There is a tedious meme making its weary way around FB. It shows a smiling British soldier and informs the viewer that the USA, a country that once fought a revolution against taxation, has just hired 87,000 more IRS agents. Where are the FB fact-checkers? There was no revolution against taxe
