Religion and… Yes! Nineteenth Century English Lit!
By popular demand... (Well, not really.)
I think that nineteenth century English literature had more to offer than the twentieth century ever received. Poets and essayists like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelly, Keats, Tennyson, Arnold, Mill, and Carlyle, reflected on faith in the new intellectual and social contexts presented by science and industry. What is striking in their body of work as a whole is their view of faith as indispensable, together with an insistence on examining it with scrupulous honesty. They were genuinely critical thinkers, testing even and especially the values and ideas they cherished most.
To read these authors is to feel that as a group, they collectively put a great deal of work toward what perhaps held the potential to become some significant new elaboration of their Judeo-Christian religious heritage that might have helped reduce its conflicts with modernity and with other religious traditions. But while their work was spiritually inspiring, it would remain squarely in the domain of literature. The spiritual insights and issues they labored so passionately to bring to our attention seem to have been quietly set aside as many people comfortably retired to the safety of their entitlement to their frequently unexamined opinions.
I guess that would be my opinion. Or impression.
Next: Introducing Thomas Carlyle, author of Sartor Resartus and “Men Who Love Capital Letters Too Much.”
Posted by Paul at 1:01 AM Permalink
17 Comments:
"While with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony, and the deep power of joy, We see into the life of things".
And that makes sense that morality is not a set of rules but a state of mind which comes from embracing and loving the whole of existence and beyond. (quote adapted from buzz lightyear, another great poet) The balance and harmony of nature includes a lot of casualties along the way, but if we have ever reached that state of mind, we can revisit it whatever happens and from there only good can come of it. I never would have thought to look there for the answer, thanks Paul, a million times.
Contemporary poems from the west are growing more "zen-like" these days, imho.
- Liz
"Words, like nature, half reveal and half conceal the soul within."
Yes, I would think that any authentic basis for morality has to come from inside. Even if one is a fundamentalist who believes that morality consists of adhering to a set of prohibitions dictated by a completely externalized God, at the very least you'd have to admit that unless those commandments resonated with something inside us, they'd lose their hold and power on us.
Yeah, I've thought of you up there... Very jealous! Wonder if I'd ever have visited the lakes district if I'd stayed healthy; I thought of it enough over the years. I'm still in awe of Wordsworth's best writing - things like The Prelude and Tintern Abbey. I would have loved to live his life.
Glad I might have helped nudge you in that direction. If you're inclined to do more reading and could get hold of a syllabus it might help direct you - there's so much material. Or for that matter, if the Norton Anthology of English Literature is still as good as it was thirty years ago, my impression was that the editors did a great job selecting material. Years later I picked up a volume of poems by GM Hopkins and was actually kind of disappointed - it seemed to me as if the Norton editors had managed to select a lot of his very best writing and what I was coming across in the Hopkins volume was generally of lesser quality.
BLUE SKY: That's interesting and encouraging about contemporary poems. Wish I could still read, but can't do hard copy anymore and so many hours per day are unproductive for me that all my "quality time" is spent blogging or dealing with aspects of getting the book into production or trying to figure out plausible ways to make people aware of it without being able to leave the house. Ugh.
THURSDAYNEXT: Me too, and I find his writing relatively clear and accessible. With Wordsworth's best stuff, I have to read a poem five times just to follow the intricacies of the grammar and know what the heck he's talking about! Then I'm finally in a position to have the type melt away and be transported.
Tennyson's In Memorium is a great example of how they were dealing with modern issues. As I recall, the subject of evolution and the extinction of species comes up in that poem.
Is this about the Transcendentalists?
And will you include Blake?
Oh, shalot - I wish I could remember dates better...
VINCENT: It happens that Blake mustn't have been covered well in the survey course I took. I know he's a major figure but I'm lacking there...
GOOGIE B: I'm going to post some excerpts from Carlyle though, so You will be able to Read a Little of the Man who Loved Capital Letters too much for Yourself...
After that I may do some posts on capital punishment, not sure. I may even try to connect them - since I'm against capital punishment, it may be that substituting life in prison with a required reading list from the 19th c. would be deemed punishment enough by a clear majority of the public...
One of my favs..
Keshi.
It was from the same shelf that, at an absurdly young age, I dipped into William James' Varieties of Religious Experience.
To this day, I think of these dippings as the guilty pleasures of an introverted child, like stealing spoonfuls of marmalade from the larder.
It was the same later with Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, even though I was required to read them at school. My English teacher conveyed the impression that they were deeply unfashionable, preferring TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. I got my revenge by writing a long essay on a Wordsworth stanza:
A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye
Fair as a star, when only one
is shining in the sky.
Would it make classics more popular if they were frowned upon or actually banned, I wonder? Generations of young people have been introduced to DH Lawrence's novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, since the famous trial in 1963 when it was unbanned. The judge asked the jury, "Would you want your wife or servant to read this book?"
And thanks for correction, its i think abt lazy typing :)
i will explain you the jist of teh song........
It is telling you abt the relation that you hold in your life and nowdays we are very careless about appreciating those taht are even close to us.
Its is saying that even the people who are living together under one roof (husband and wife, mother and son etc) are now like starngers to each other. these relations are like now two people on same bed and having their own blanket and not aware of their partner life.
And we are loosing the warmth in those relations that sometimes used to be there.
And very first line of that song says that Now it hard to find the exact love here in our life but what we are perceiving is the shadow of that.
Hope i am very much now clear to you on this point.
Smiles :)
VINCENT: Yeah, I did a lot of that kind of premature reading too. When I was ten or eleven I read a book called The Story of Philosophy by I think it may have been a Will Durant? Anyway, it was a survey of major figures, from Socrates to Nietche. For years afterward I was left with the impression that one day I would have to read the venerable ancient classics "Ibid" and "Op. Cit." because they were mentioned so often in the footnotes!
Yeah, maybe forbidden should be played up - more emphasis could always be placed on Byron's Don Juan. That was something I stumbled into at age seventeen. A lot of those scenes are pretty memorable, like the one where Don hides under the sheets between the woman's legs when her husband comes to the door... And it's all conveyed in such perfect rhyme and meter!
PRASHANT, thanks for telling me about this. I wonder if you ever happened to hear Simon and Garfunkel's The Sound of Silence. Sounds like a similar theme.
We humans are now in the vortex of a Perfect Storm created by the collison of unbridled Narcissism and Technology.
Great writers from the past must morph into bite sized BRANDs that can be googled at a moment's notice. We must dispense with reciting verse and substitue it for search, copy, & paste a 'sound bite' as a tip of the hat to our la-di-da-ness.
A true learned gentlemen once had to store information in his head and be able to apply it eloquently and with some semblence of contextual purposefullness during social intercourse. Now it's whatever!
The full effects of the Information Revolution are anyone's guess but it would appear that most people remain true to their greedy, nervous, primate, ancestors.
Writing was once regarded as a unique gift. We now know that Millions of books and blogs are published every year proving that MILLIONS of people are quite capable of combining thoughts into words
..OK before you freak out..certainly not into the culturally biased masterpieces that we have allowed the Academia Nuts to register as Classics...but communicating thoughts is now being managed on a different scale.
Another part of the equation is the transformation of the English language itself. This great flexible whore is busy, busy, busy morphing into an abbreviated fonetic langwij that may bee unrekognizabal in a hundred yeers.
Thats what is reflected in the works of these poets.
GAUTAMI: I'm with you there. But to answer your rhetorical question: triviality and self absorption. I've seen quite a lot of that in poetry as well. Actually, I've also seen some other kinds of stuff too. But for me poetry that has nothing to do with spirituality is like desert without chocolate.
LEILA: Are you just another thesis teaser, or must I ask you to marry me? It must be one of those... unless you were referring to Gautami's thought...
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