Franz Schubert’s music is the music of Paradise lost. It is the songful lament of the wanderer who has been banished, yet who must find the difficult way back through suffering and death. It is music of the journey in exile. In terms of his achievement there is only one other composer to whom Franz […]
It is critical to remember that the meeting times as well as the membership of the Inklings were always and ever fluid. The group of friends never pretended to be a formal club, and they never desired it to exist as a sort of ideological cell. Over the years from roughly 1931 to 1949, the […]
The conservatism of Robert Frost was rooted in his tendency to view existence as inherently paradoxical. Frost carefully crafted and honed metaphor as a device to express such tensions in suggestive rather than didactic ways, which sometimes resulted in critical misinterpretations that deny the importance of the metaphysical in his verse. Robert Frost: The Poet […]
St. Thomas Aquinas has the rare quality of wanting to know all that can be said for the other side. He understands that you can’t find good answers. Before I discovered Shakespeare, the writer I most admired was St. Thomas Aquinas. Dazzling as Shakespeare is, I think I was right the first time. Apples and […]
Mozart was not like us. The question as to why Mozart died so young is always superseded by: How could he have existed at all? How could you ask more of a miracle?” In 1991, the bicentennial of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s death was the occasion for massive festivals and grand recording projects, as well as […]
The modern secularist, T.S. Eliot, finds meaning either in the brute forces of the physical world or the arbitrary freeplay of the mind or the passing consensus of the human tribe. Looking for meaning in these places has not only led individuals to a sense of nihilism but has led whole nations to slaughter innocent […]
Nowhere to be seen now are the old Jeffersonians, once a major American type, rebellious men who dared defend the rights of themselves and their communities from outside impositions. But buried somewhere deep in the American soul is a tiny ember of Jeffersonian democracy that now and then gives off an uncertain, feeble, and futile […]
Rules are good things to have. We need to learn not to wipe our noses on our sleeves, not to take stuff that isn’t ours, not to scream at people when we’re debating them on television, not to shout abuse at politicians even if they deserve it. But as useful as rules like that can […]
Something about the way in which metaphysical poetry engages the mind is unique to this style of verse. A combination of relatable simplicity with conceptual eclecticism renders it into a form of expression that can be deeply and personally felt by the reader, but only once he works through the poet’s intricate analogies and “metaphysical” […]
In a moment when the forces of ideology seem to threaten to overwhelm the voice of sanity and civility, Eva Brann’s imaginative conservatism offers another way—a way rooted in, as she has put it, “talking, reading, writing, listening.” Editor’s Note: This essay is part of a series dedicated to Senior Contributor Dr. Eva Brann of St. John’s […]
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