The Frame

Reading Tristram Shandy in an Age of Distraction – Literary Hub

So…now I really want to read Tristram Shandy. I actually love the movie that came out a decade or two ago, but I’ve always been a little afraid to tackle this 18th century behemoth. I don’t know that this makes it sound EASIER, but I’m intrigued by how it does sound.

Our lives today exist in multiple dimensions: the present, the past, and online. Sterne’s novel might help us to make sense of this tangle. Reading Tristram Shandy for the third time, I realized that my previous frustration was not a failure to understand the book. Sterne’s digressions are both rich and unsatisfying in equal measure, as any surfeit of information must be. But whilst trawling the internet often leaves me drained or feeling numbed by variety, Sterne’s novel invigorates as it overwhelms.

Schooled – Alan Jacobs

Really neat reflection led by Tom Shippey’s book The Author of the Century, on what separates Modernist writers’ use of classical literary allusion from how Tolkien uses Norse sources. Disclaimer: I do love both Tolkien and Modernist writers. :)

The great Modernist writers have a tendency to flatter their learned readers and disdain the others; they are in many respects principially elitist. (As has often been noted, Leopold Bloom is Joyce’s hero but he couldn’t have read Joyce’s book about him.) There’s none of this in Tolkien; the astonishing range of allusions to medieval writing in The Lord of the Rings is certainly meant to provide a kind of felt (not directly perceived) coherence to the reader — Shippey is great on this — but its primary purpose is to satisfy Tolkien’s own imaginative needs.

The Integrity of Poetry – Micah Mattix

A thoughtful response and update of poet Dana Gioia’s 1991 inquiry “Can Poetry Matter?” and whether poetry has begun to matter again in the ensuing three decades, or has regained the integrity that Gioia feared had been destroyed as poetry became the property of academics writing for each other for tenure rather than a vital, central part of national discourse (as of course, it was some centuries ago). Though poetry is more visible in some ways, Mattix isn’t apparently convinced that visibility is actually treating poetry as poetry, rather than as political or moral statement. The essay is wide-ranging and a good reminder for those of us who use even old poetry as teachers that poetry is valuable BECAUSE it is poetry, not merely because it contains ideas. How to do this well I think is a continuing question we need to consider.

This is to espouse a view of poetry that, though more noble than that of the Instapoets, is not different in kind. To value poetry primarily for how it teaches humility and kindness, for how it teaches us to be good friends and citizens, to act justly, or to love well is likewise to view poetry as a means to an end. To value it primarily for what it says rather than how it says it is to undermine its integrity. This leads sooner or later to the subjugation of poetry to politics or theology (or psychology), which, in turn, renders it useless to society as poetry. Poetry is an essential part of society—but only as itself and not as a vehicle for something else.

Caspar David Friedrich and the “Reliturgification” of the West – Imaginative Conservative

The image above is one of the most famous Romantic paintings, a man standing tall against the wild crashing of waves below him – man in contemplation of the sublimity of nature. I’ve seen this picture a lot, but never delved into the artist or his other works. This article uses Friedrich as an example of the Romantic obsession with nature, and is one of the better short attempts I’ve seen to explain how the Romantics’ found transcendence in nature despite their general turn toward secularism.

The Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century was more than historians often understand it to be. With an unparalleled subjectivity and exuberance, it is usually seen as a reaction to the rationalism of the so-called Enlightenment. From the crescendos of Beethoven to the lyrics of Byron, it sought the transformation of a culture constrained, as proponents saw it, by eighteenth-century conventions of counterpoint and the couplet. However, as Romanticism elevated sentiment it also advanced an equally ambitious effort to secure a transcendent anchor for its cult of feeling. Advocates were painfully, even desperately aware that a yawning chasm had opened between the world and the source of its transformation, heaven. They were secularists to the core, but they nevertheless realized that the impasse of modernity was an ironic outcome of secularization.