So, why is speed needed to say poetry? It is the sound of sense waking up the latent agility of the tongue: “speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.” It is attention to sharper contrasts, to multiplying facets, to a superabundant collation of angular things all [...]
Archive for the ‘language’ Category
The Speed of Verse, II
Posted in Charles Williams, Dante, God, Herbert, John Crowe Ransom, Pound, Vergil, Yeats, art, beginnings, birds, books, crannies, dialogue, dreaming, eccentric, history, idiosyncrasy, labor, language, latin, love?, rule, speed, stars, sun, the body, time, translation, verse on October 10, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Another Reflection on Lucretius
Posted in Lucretius, anyone, beginnings, books, cosmos, dialogue, fate, language, latin, letters, necessity, rain, rule, spring, the grave, the impossible, translation, water on April 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
The Poetry of Lucretius’ Invitation to Accept “Mater Rebus Certa”
In lines 188-198 of the first book of De Rerum Natura, Lucretius describes the implications of there being a “semine certo”, a definite seed for every kind of thing, that each thing has “sua … materia.” His particular concerns in this passage are: that the developement [...]
approach to meaning restores the experience/ in a different form
Posted in John Donne, T.S. Eliot, anyone, art, books, cosmos, dialogue, fate, history, indirect discourse, language, letters, library, love?, necessity, the grave, time, translation on April 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
John Donne:
All mankind is of one author, and is one volume. When one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by [...]
try and understand me …
Posted in H.W. Fowler, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, dialogue, eccentric, indirect discourse, language, latin, letters, wit on April 9, 2009 | 4 Comments »
I want to praise a book—A Dictionary of Modern English Usage by H.W. Fowler—but I cannot at this moment find the right words to do justice to the object of my admiration.
Instead, I’ll give an example of what I admire (which incidentally confirms and elucidates one of my long and vehemently held beliefs):
try. The idiom [...]
My Aim
Posted in God, Socrates, anyone, beginnings, books, conjunctions, cosmos, dialogue, greek, history, language, logic, love? on April 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
In his beautiful reflection on the Catholic Intellectual Tradition given at Regensburg Pope Benedict affirms the “profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the Biblical understanding of faith in God.” He points to this “profound harmony” at work in the beginning of John’s Gospel. “In the beginning [...]
for my novel class
Posted in Dostoevsky, Goethe, Indian Summer, Jean Paul Friedrich Richter, Kant, Werther, books, crannies, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, idiosyncrasy, language, latin, letters, logic, love?, mania, necessity, nooks, novel, speed, spring, stars, summer, sun, the grave, time, wind, wisdom, wit on March 3, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Jean Paul Richter’s Maria Wuz: Inversions of Time, Nooks, Exceptions to the Rule, Interpolations and a Room for Man Cut out of, or Built into, the Universe
Proceeding according to no a priori principle, but seeking rather to treat of Jean Paul’s “Life of Maria Wuz, Merry Dominie of Auenthal” without wronging its delightfully angled discourse [...]
Vivant Dr. Sampo, Dr. Mumbach, Miss Bonifield, Mr. Shea, Miss Enos, and the others! — Semper Sint in Flore
Posted in Indian Summer, Janus, annihilation, anyone, art, athens, autumn, beginnings, bells, books, crannies, cry, defeat, dialogue, eccentric, exceptions, fate, flowers, greek, history, hubris, idiosyncrasy, language, letters, love?, mania, melos, mosaic, necessity, nemesis, nooks, polis, rain, rule, spring, stars, summer, the fall, the impossible, time, tragedy, wind, winter, wisdom, wit on February 24, 2009 | 1 Comment »
What Is Catholic About a College Degree
Peter V. Sampo
President, Thomas More College
Let us assume the college has a Catholic liturgy, teaches Orthodox Catholic theology, and is under the auspices of a religious order, a diocese, or is, at least, canonically recognized by a diocese. Further, let us assume loyalty to the Magisterium. As necessary as [...]
something I wrote for my Lucretius class
Posted in Aphrodite, God, Homer, Lucretius, Venus, anyone, beginnings, conjunctions, fate, greek, history, ladies, language, latin, love?, sailing, sun, traffic, voluptas, water, wind on February 9, 2009 | 1 Comment »
y calling Venus “Aeneadae genetrix” Lucretius both accepts a mythic inheritance and returns it to his reader strangely transformed. The phrase focuses our attention on the overwhelming nearness of Aphrodite to Anchises that produced Aeneas, and seeks to extend the brilliance and force of that strange and momentary relationship of the human and divine – “hominum divumque voluptas” – over the begetting of each of the Aeneadae. But, by an odd sort of logic, the poet’s extending her particular role in the birth of Aeneas over the births of men in general, Venus herself, the brilliant, dissembling, shame-faced goddess who shines in the Homeric hymn is allowed to recede farther from our sphere. The intimacy of Aphrodite’s union with Anchises is evoked mutedly here only to release her from it into the more general and metaphorical motherhood that befits the respectful distance Lucretius grants the gods. By “pluralizing” this union, this highest pleasure of men and gods – “hominum divumque,” Lucretius prepares us to let that “and” assume a more disjunctive and subdued force, in contrast to the conjoining violence at the meeting-point of gods and men which is the center of the Homeric cosmos.
this need to kneel
Posted in Dickinson, Indian Summer, June, Levertov, Sophistry, T. S. Eliot, art, autumn, language, summer, the fall, the impossible, wind on December 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Levertov, Denise, 1923-1997:
from The Stream and the Sapphire (1997) , New Directions
Of Being
I know this happiness
is provisional:
the looming presences—
great suffering, great fear—
withdraw only
into peripheral vision:
but ineluctable this shimmering
of wind in the blue leaves:
this flood of stillness
widening the lake of sky:
this need [...]
speech ending quietly
Posted in God, athens, beginnings, dialogue, greek, language, love?, mania, rule, summer, wind, wisdom on November 17, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Phaedrus: . . . But let’s be going, since now even the stifling heat is more gentle.
Socrates: Shouldn’t we pray to the gods here before going?
Phaedrus: Yes, surely.
Socrates: Dear Pan and ye other gods who dwell here, grant that I may become beautiful within and that my worldly belongings be in accord with my inner [...]
