I like to style myself a literary omnivore, but one genre I’ll admit I seldom touch is biography. I’ve read one on Robert E. Lee, and back in high school and college I read some biographies of various rock bands, but I preferred those that focused primarily on their music and secondarily on the musicians' personal lives. A recent review, of The Printed Homer, included some biographical speculation, but ultimately one can’t really write a biography of a man about whom we know so little for certain that we’re not even sure if he was one dude or multiple dudes.
Philip H. Young’s The Printed Homer: A 3000 Year Publishing and Translation History of the Iliad and the Odyssey is an odd book to recommend to laymen because about half of it will be useful only to a very focused class of specialists. The other half, though, is of interest to any Classicist, professional or amateur, and is enough to justify buying the whole package.
The specialist half can be dealt with very briefly.
Not that long ago the common complaint around the Right (broadly defined) was that we needed more dissident artists and authors. Over the past year or two, though, that situation has been reversing itself and it feels like everyone who’s anyone now has a novel coming out. I’ve reviewed Neovictorian’s book Sanity previously, and Neovictorian himself has reviewed Sanction and The Brave and the Bold, while in short fiction there’s enough material for Logos Club to offer a weekly overview of it all.
In ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound wrote that a man can’t fully understand poetry if he reads only one language. Later on, when listing authors important to the development of English poetry he also included a few Frenchman. With both those points in mind, I thought it would be appropriate to include a few French poets even though the focus of this list is on English authors. So, today we’ll meet M.
Dans ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound a écrit qu’un homme ne peut pas comprendre la poésie s’il ne lit qu’une seule langue. Il a énuméré des auteurs importants pour le développement de la poésie anglaise et il a inclus quelques Français. En gardant ce point à l’esprit, j’ai pensé qu’il serait approprié de discuter d’un des poètes mentionnés par Pound comme étant importants pour la poésie anglaise. Nous allons donc rencontrer aujourd’hui François Villon.
There are two important parts of the Christmas holiday; the first, of course, is the Nativity of Our Lord. Second is a focus on family, and children in particular. Christmas puts me, and many others, into a nostalgic mood, thinking back to Christmas Mass, exchanging gifts on Christmas morning, then going over to my grandparents' house to have dinner and play with my cousins. God willing, I’ll be able to extend these experiences to a new generation, but with last year’s addition of my nephew to the family children are once again part of the Carroll family’s Christmas.
Note: This is another republication from Thermidor, where it first appeared on March 20, 2018.
“The classics have more and more become a baton exclusively for the cudgelling of schoolboys, and less and less a diversion for the mature.” Ezra Pound’s observation, from a 1920 essay on translations of Homer, may have been true at the time but has, in the following decades, become somewhat optimistic. Often, schoolboys aren’t really taught the classics at all, but insofar as they are, “cudgelling” is still about right.
Thomas Randolph was born in 1605 and was another member of the Tribe of Ben. I normally like to write a little about our friends' “day jobs,” but unfortunately Randolph died young, at twenty-nine years old in 1635. Fortunately, he did see a good deal of success in his own lifetime primarily as a dramatist but also as a poet, as one would expect of a friend of Ben Jonson and his circle, and many expected him to eventually become poet laureate.
Today, we’ll meet Mr. Alfred Edward Housman, a popular English poet and a staple of English literature classes, so I assume that most folks are at least aware of him. He was born in 1859 and attended Oxford, but failed his final exam due to emotional turmoil, apparently due in part to struggling with homosexual desires. So, he spent ten years (1882-92) working as a clerk at the Patent Office while spending his free time studying and writing articles about Latin literature.
Note: This is another article first published at Thermidor, on May 24, 2018. I’ve been republishing these in chronological order, but since Sanity is still fairly new I decided to expedite this one.
How does one go about writing a “Right-wing” novel? The wrong way is to emphasise the “Right-wing” part, which transforms the novel into mere propaganda. At best, an ideological novel will succeed only in entertaining the already converted.