Podcasts about Alexander Pope

Just a Bag of Flesh “To err is human, to forgive is divine meaning” That is a quote from 1711 by Alexander Pope. We are ALL human so what does that really mean and how can we apply it today in our everyday life? Please join me today to find out.

R. A. Pennethorne provides the PNEU perspective on Alexander Pope's dictum, “the proper study of mankind is man” in this vintage article from 1921. Read by Jennifer Talsma.

Today's poem argues you don't have to like birthdays to have a happy one. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

On this week's episode of The Literary Life, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks will discuss Pope's mock epic poem, "The Rape of the Lock." They begin the conversation by talking about two types of satire to set us up for an accurate understand of this poem. They also talk about the form of a mock epic poem and a burlesque. This conversation brings out the various allusions to classical heroic epic poems juxtaposed with the frivolous in this story. You can check out all the latest offerings of mini-classes and webinars, including Heather Goodman's upcoming webinar on P.L. Travers' Mary Poppins, at HouseofHumaneLetters.com. For more show notes, please visit https://theliterary.life/326. 

Pope's Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind's place in the vast Chain of Being.Each of the poem's four Epistles takes a different perspective, presenting Man in relation to the universe, as individual, in society and, finally, tracing his prospects for achieving the goal of happiness.In choosing stately rhyming couplets to explore his theme, Pope sometimes becomes obscure through compressing his language overmuch. By and large, the work is a triumphant exercise in philosophical poetry, communicating its broad and commonplace truths in superbly balanced phrases which remind us that Pope, alas, is one of the most quoted but least read writers in English:“Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Pope's Essay on Man, a masterpiece of concise summary in itself, can fairly be summed up as an optimistic enquiry into mankind's place in the vast Chain of Being.Each of the poem's four Epistles takes a different perspective, presenting Man in relation to the universe, as individual, in society and, finally, tracing his prospects for achieving the goal of happiness.In choosing stately rhyming couplets to explore his theme, Pope sometimes becomes obscure through compressing his language overmuch. By and large, the work is a triumphant exercise in philosophical poetry, communicating its broad and commonplace truths in superbly balanced phrases which remind us that Pope, alas, is one of the most quoted but least read writers in English:“Hope springs eternal in the human breast: Man never is, but always To be Blest.”Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Send us Fan MailToday, you get to treat yourselves to a discussion of Pope's major satirical poems: The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad.  And, as a special bonus, you get to endure a desultory introduction concerning the Beatles at a cocktail party as well as series of pop culture references that are no less than 40 years old.  The Texts:The Rape of the Lock: https://jacklynch.net/Texts/rapelock.html The Dunciad: https://congresoartistas.masonicvipclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/the-dunciad.pdfSupport the showIf you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it with a small donation.  Click the "Support the Show" button.  So grateful!Or Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/classicenglishliteraturePlease like, subscribe, and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you listen.  Thank you!Email: classicenglishliterature@gmail.comFollow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.Podcast Theme Music: "Rejoice" by G.F. Handel, perf. The Advent Chamber OrchestraSubcast Theme Music: "Sons of the Brave" by Thomas Bidgood, perf. The Band of the Irish GuardsSound effects and incidental music: Freesounds.orgMy thanks and appreciation to all the generous providers!

Today on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks share an introduction to the Neo-Classical Poets, including Alexander Pope, and their poetry. First off, they establish a definition of the Neo-classical period both in terms of time and of culture. In addition, Angelina points out some ways in which the coming of the Enlightenment throws off ideals of the Medievals in favor of those of the Greeks and Romans. Another topic they highlight is the popularity of the satire in this period, as well as the prevelance of the printed word. After this general introduction to the period, Thomas shares a biographical sketch of Alexander Pope. Join us back again here next week when we will discuss Pope's mock epic poem, "The Rape of the Lock." You can check out all the latest offerings of mini-classes and webinars, including Jenn Roger's webinar on C. S. Lewis' The Pilgrim's Regress, at HouseofHumaneLetters.com. For the full show notes for this episode, please visit our podcast website at https://theliterary.life/325. 

On The Literary Life Podcast with Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks this week, we will wrap up our discussion of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. After sharing their commonplace quote for this week, Thomas and Angelina jump right into recapping the important plot points of this last section of the book. They start with some contrasts between St. John and Rochester, then they talk about the journey of the soul and the image of marriage. They also consider the parallels of her return to Thornfield and the reversals in these scenes, as well as how Brontë fulfills the various fairy tale endings she set up earlier in the book. You can check out all the latest offerings of mini-classes and webinars, both upcoming and recorded in the past. Find everything at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, where you can also sign up for the HHL newsletter to stay in the loop about all the latest happenings! Join us back here next week for an introduction to Alexander Pope and the Neo-classical Poets, followed by an episode on Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". In May, we will have a special guest interview of Malcolm Guite all about his new book, Galahad and the Grail. You can check out the full version of our show notes for this episode at https://theliteray.life/324. 

Sometime in 1711, a twenty-year-old aristocrat, Lord Petre, snipped a lock of hair, without permission, from the head of Arabella Fermor, a celebrated beauty. The incident caused an irreconcilable rift between the two families, who were both Catholic. Shortly afterwards, the young poet Alexander Pope, also Catholic, was approached by a friend who suggested he turn the incident into a comic poem. The result was one of the bestselling poems of the age, ‘The Rape of the Lock' (1712), a mock-epic that fused the grand styles of Homer, Virgil and Milton with an acerbic social satire, in which the gods are reimagined as airy sylphs guarding the honour of the heroine, Belinda. William Hazlitt wrote of the poem that ‘you hardly know whether to laugh or weep', and in this episode Seamus and Mark discuss why Pope's masterpiece is at once the funniest poem in the English language and an essay on the seriousness of trivial things. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up: Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applesignupnp Other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/scsignupnp Read more in the LRB: Claude Rawson on 'The Rape of the Lock': https://lrb.me/nppope01 Colin Burrow on Pope: https://lrb.me/nppope02

Episode 90 Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans   Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/90_Letter_to_My_Mother_by_Suzannah_V_Evans.mp3 This poem is from: Under the Blue Available from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK   Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans You, pedalling your armsabove your head in bed,that bad arm suddenlymobile and flexible.You, meeting me at school,feeling something stir, sprinting across the grass . . . the two of us laughing, Mr. Tarpin peeringquizzically from the gate.You, with your bright lipstick.You, with your hands like mine.You, with your floppy hat.You, with your easy laugh.You, with the ellipsesof your emails. Your strongfront crawl. Your assertivegestures as you motionthrough talk. Now, when I swim, the movement of my armsis for you. A high arc,fingertips cleaving bright.Shuddering kick of legs.The sea pool in Seixalis for you. Craggy rocksand my head dipped to blue.Grey crabs line the rocks:I think of the limpets that spot McClure's paintingwith the reading woman,sun hat, white paper sheaf.Memory of last summer,absorbed in Woolf outside.A sudden rush of windcaused the parasol to liftand your own hat to spin right up from your head – where it hovered longerthan seemed possible, black ribbon flapping. Porto Moniz   Interview transcript Mark: Suzannah, where did this poem come from? Suzannah: So this poem emerged towards the end of my writing process for writing the poems in Under the Blue which is my first poetry collection. And the first two parts of the book… The book is a triptych of sequences, sort of playing with epistolary forms, so postcards and letters. The first two parts of the book are playing quite specifically with the form of the postcard, and the poems are quite private poems, in some ways. And I was interested in using the postcard form because it is a form which is both private and, in a sense, public in that, when you're writing a postcard, you're writing it to an individual. But a postie can turn that postcard over and read what's on the back. Anyone can read what's on the back. And with this third section in the book, I wanted to directly address some of the earlier figures who had appeared in the first two sections, and I suppose, to address them and to kind of write directly to people. So this poem is written to my mother, and it's in the form of a letter. And I'd say that the writing of this particular poem, this section of the book, was much more deliberate in some ways than the first two sections, which kind of emerged. And then, once I'd written those sections, I had sort of most of a manuscript, and these letters were really kind of, for me, kind of sealing and sending the manuscript off and kind of finishing it in that sense. Mark: Okay. It's really interesting to know that, the postcards come first in the book, and they're all prose poems, aren't they? Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: So they look like postcards on the page. And then, at the end, you've got the sequence of letters, which are kind of long and thin, maybe, to me, suggesting letters are longer than postcards. So, how did you start writing postcards, to begin with? And then we'll move on to the letters. Suzannah: That's a good question. So the postcards, I think I'm always looking for formal inspiration in the things around me. So I am a formal poet in the sense that I've written sonnets. I've written rondels, a lot of rondels. And I'm very interested in traditional form, but I'm also interested in the way that the world can provide forms for the poet. And I was on holiday, visiting my partner's father, when… So this is the first postcard in the book, although it's not sort of titled as a postcard. It's called ‘Under the Blue'. It's the title poem. And that sort of was drawn from a roughly real-life event, where sort of there was this incident with a kayak. My partner was swept off his feet, and it really just brought back to me an earlier experience of actually witnessing a seizure. And that was an experience which had really, really shocked me, and it had come completely out of the blue, really just out of nowhere. And I don't know why, but I had wanted to write about it. Maybe that's a kind of processing thing, or maybe it's just a way to kind of hold close different things that happen in your life. But I'd known for a while that I'd wanted to write about it, and this was years and years later. But seeing this figure being kind of knocked over and sort of just being sort of buffeted in that way really took me back to that night with the seizure. And I felt like these two events were kind of doubled, and I could kind of see both of them at the same time. So it started off with writing about that. And it was, because I was on holiday, a postcard seemed like an apt way to write about that. And so I suppose, kind of, it really started with that first poem. And it's quite subtle, I think, the moment with the seizure. It sort of comes towards the end of the poem. You can sort of read it almost without thinking about the seizure too much. But it does. I think, sort of, that event refracts across the collection. So even though there are moments sort of later in the book where the word seizures is used, someone seizes someone else's wrist in that sort of, a kind of reference back, there's a lot of falling over in the book, a lot of stumbling. And yeah, so I think the impetus for the postcards, kind of, it came from that first section. And actually, they were literal postcards, because I sent some of them. I kind of printed them off and sent them to friends in the post. Because I love…I'm a big letter writer. I send a lot of postcards. Like, postcards are really a big…it sounds weird to say that postcards are a big part of my life, but they kind of are. Like, I really love postcards. I like to collect them from galleries. And so it's partly a homage to my love of the postcard. And I think, also, with postcards, you have the art or the image on the postcard as well. And there's a few kind of ekphrastic moments in the book. So, kind of, all of that is woven in, I think. And the idea of what you can't say in a postcard, I think that's what the middle section of the book, for me, kind of turns the form on its head a little bit more to kind of write about things that maybe you actually wouldn't necessarily write in a postcard. So, to me, I kind of think of them as anti-postcards, almost. Yeah. Mark: So, the form is actually rooted in your life, that you do send postcards. It's not just a conceit for you. Suzannah: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Mark: And of course, when a poem is framed as a postcard or a letter, there is a sense of it feels personal. You know, ‘I' and ‘you' are always… Quite often, there can be quite a lot of ambiguity about who the I is and who the you is. But if you signal it as a letter, like last month, I did Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which was four verse epistles to Viscount Bolingbroke. And so that puts a different frame on it when you know that he's addressing, ‘My Lord,' and we're kind of overhearing that. Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: There's a sense that this is a personal communication, that maybe there's a real relationship underpinning. Suzannah: Yes. And I think that's something that the whole collection kind of plays with in a way. When I teach poetry, I'm always very adamant, or sort of something that I talk about with students is this idea that you never really can conflate the I of the poem with the poet. Even when there is autobiographical kind of crossover, I think there's something that happens. When you write a poem, it becomes an art object. It becomes something that is changed. I almost want to say it's not a photograph, but I think photographs are kind of complex as well in the way that they capture reality. So I think, for me, there is a real distinction between the first and second sections and the third section of the book. But something that I kind of have been thinking about as well is there's a poem that T.S. Eliot wrote to his wife, and he says something, like, ‘These are private words addressed to you in public.' And so I think this idea of what is private and what is public is really…it makes it quite hard for me to talk about the book sometimes, I think, but it's really at the crux of what it is, the sense of sort of letting the reader into some kind of quite private spaces and the importance of doing that as well, how the private is political. Just all of those things are kind of in there. But I think, in particular, the letters are really public declarations of love and trust, and they are very felt poems that are intended to honour particular people. And the collection ends with a letter to my father, who… The father figure is sort of less present in the earlier sections of the book, but it sort of attributes to my dad. That is an autobiographical kind of poem at the end of the book, which is in thanks really for everything that he does to hold up the people who are in earlier parts of the book and to kind of celebrate his role, to celebrate what he does as a carer, but also just to kind of… I think the letters are just…they're like praise poems really. They're just intended to celebrate these people. Mark: That's a nice idea, isn't it? The praise poem. That should maybe be more prominent, shouldn't it? Suzannah: Yeah. Mark: So with this one, specifically, what could you say about your intention in writing the letter to your mother? Suzannah: I think that this was one of the letters that I found more difficult to write, because the figure of the mother…and again, I won't say my mother because I think, for me, there's still this distinction between, even while the book draws on lived experience, it's not a direct reflection of that. But I think because of the earlier sections of the book, which are, at times, quite stark, I really wanted to write a poem that, I don't know, that sort of dwelled on movement and closeness and joy, I guess, just the delight, the sheer kind of delight of someone moving how they want to move. I think that I was kind of looking at this poem again before, thinking that we were going to talk about it. And that movement, to me, there's a shift after all the sort of you, you, you parts of the poem, which sort of have more kind of…the lines sort of go more to the end of the line. And then, when it starts talking about swimming, there are sort of full stops towards the middle of the lines. And I sort of wanted there to be almost like a kind of pull through those lines, as if someone is swimming through those lines, and you feel the arm going down, your strong front crawl, pause, your assertive gestures as you motion through talk. So kind of like having that pulling movement as swimming in the poem. And my mum, who is disabled, she was diagnosed with a neurological illness when I was 12. She used to be a really keen swimmer. And I remember as a child seeing her do front crawl and being, like, ‘Wow.' I actually only learned to do front crawl properly when I was in my late twenties. And I now love… I really love doing front crawl. I absolutely love it. And again, I swim in celebration of my mum. So if I swim front crawl, I'll always do a length for my mum and kind of dedicate that length to her. So all of those things, again, they're kind of these quite private things that are kind of in the poem, but not fully in the poem. But I think that if you have those kind of reverberations of these kind of memories or feelings, even if you don't write about them directly, they're kind of pulled into the poem through the energy of the language that you do decide to use. Mark: And interestingly, as you talk about the relationship between the real person and the person in the poem, I guess another effect, for me, at least, as a reader, is when I read this, it just makes me think, Oh yeah, people do have their different ways of moving and opening a book or eating a salad, or whatever it may be. That's their kind of signature style in life. Or the little quirks in the way they punctuate their emails. Suzannah: Yeah, yeah. Mark: And so there's the thing of it's very specific, but it's also very suggestive, I think, that we easily identify with a relationship like this, even if the circumstances are different. Suzannah: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I like what you say about movement, though. And I feel like every person has their own kind of form, like, if we're thinking about form in poetry. It's what I think about when I watch people run a lot of the time. I'm thinking about, ‘Wow.' Really, really, really different form, really different ways of moving, even though that repetitive motion is very… There are only so many ways that you can run, and yet it is so different for everyone. And I think, with this poem as well, something that I was interested in doing was kind of going back to an earlier point, kind of. So, that ‘You, meeting me at school,' kind of thinking about earlier times as well. And again, the ‘sprinting across the grass' kind of goes back in a way to that opening epigraph to the book, which is from Virginia Woolf's novel, To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf being a modernist writer. And it's… Oh, not Virginia Woolf, sorry, what am I saying? It does go back to that, but I'm actually thinking of Charles Baudelaire, who talks about ‘the ecstasy and horror of life'. Mark: He's great, isn't he? Suzannah: Yeah, really. But this idea of the kind of sprinting across the grass, it was just such a joyful thing, such an incredibly out-of-the-blue, again, to go back to that phrase, sudden burst of energy and motion. And I think we were laughing, but also probably crying, so we probably looked pretty strange. And again, I think the book is really interested in those kind of doubled states where maybe there's sort of deep despair, but also real joy, or anger, but delight. So kind of there's a sense of these cyclical movements through those different states, different emotions, or even a kind of merging of those two things together at the same time. Mark: And can I pick up on the Virginia Woolf reference, because that…I mean, in your writing, there's a lot of summer seaside imagery, and you've got the epigraph from To the Lighthouse. So, I would bet that the person reading Woolf outside was reading To the Lighthouse in this poem. And of course, that's a novel with a mother very much at the centre of it. I mean, it's clearly artfully placed in the poem. So I was curious about, what was your decision to put that in? Suzannah: Yeah. I mean, I think it's a very sort of associative poem. It kind of goes from the reference to Daphne McClure, who is an artist, and she has this wonderful, kind of quite humorous painting of a woman reading. And then it kind of goes to actual reading. Mark: Yes. Suzannah: But then it kind of goes back to McClure as well, because in the painting, this woman is reading, she's got this big sheaf of papers or this big kind of white book paper that she's reading. And then the poem kind of has that in mind. And then, when the hat lifts at the end of the poem, sort of, you've got all of it there. So it's kind of going back to that visual image and making its own kind of different visual image at the end of the poem. And I really love, in Woolf's novel, there's this idea of, like, Lily, the painter, and she's thinking about sort of making her mark. And how do you make a mark? How do you begin? How do you create? How do you have a vision? So I suppose that's part of it. And then the epigraph to the book is really just my favourite sort of thing, and it's this idea that Woolf is writing about that if you're watching, if you're looking at waves from far off, kind of, they look very symmetrical, and they look very regular. But if your perspective changes and you're suddenly the swimmer in those waves, it's completely different. You're having this entirely other experience where, you know, how a painter might paint those waves from far off, these lovely, kind of, they're all the same size, they're kind of coming regularly. And then, to be that swimmer, who is having to kind of arch over each wave or sort of get over each wave, and relentlessly, just wave after wave, and each one is different, you know. So again, there's that kind of repetition idea in there, but also this idea of scale and perspective, and the idea that you might kind of look at something from far away, and it seems very orderly, and it seems very symmetrical, and it seems very easy to deal with, essentially. But if you are the swimmer, that's not the case. And each thing requires a lot of consideration. And that's really what the middle section of the book is interested in, sort of how to write about care and how to write about things, which are just very different, I think, when you're in the midst of them, and every particular thing is something that needs to be negotiated in that way. So the image of waves in the Woolf novel is very important, and also the idea of, in the novel, obviously, the lighthouse is this kind of ever-present, sort of, almost like a character. And I wanted the sea to have that role in this book. So a lot of my earlier writing has been about the sea. And this book is less directly about the sea, but the sea is always present, and I wanted it to be heard and felt, even when it's not kind of being described in detail. Mark: That's a very interesting point about different perspectives, because I think we experience that throughout the book. So some of the postcards are very much about the more difficult aspects of care, caring for a parent. So we read this one in the light of that, and vice versa, and so this is, if you like, the praise poem, the joy, the celebratory. Suzannah: Yes. And I think I'm very, very interested in the relationship between prose… I was going to say prose poetry and line-broken poetry, but also just poetry and prose. And a lot of my influences for writing are quite prose-y, often. I'm interested in prose writers, and I'm interested in where that line is between this idea of what makes a prose poem a poem. And I think if you give a reader a kind of extensive amount of prose, and that sets up a particular kind of rhythm, a particular kind of feel, but then, to follow that with very short-lined poems, line-broken poems, it's a different kind of… I think I wanted it to be almost like a kind of lift at the end of the book, where you've kind of had this kind of, I don't want to say denser, but definitely starker prose. And then there's kind of a much shorter section at the end of the letters, it's very short, but it's kind of just a movement into a different kind of writing. And I wanted that to be a noticeable kind of contrast. Mark: Yeah, definitely. I mean, even visually on the page, the prose looks denser, whereas these, I don't know, it feels like you pick your way a bit more nimbly through these. How did you arrive at that as the solution to how you represent a letter on a page? And was this one of the later ones? So in a sense, the form was predetermined, but it's like you're writing a sonnet sequence, and then you know that there's going to be another one like that. Suzannah: Yeah. So I really do like a sequence. A huge amount of my writing involves sequences, and I think there's something about, if you do something one time and you like it, I think it's worth doing it again. So my first pamphlet is a sequence of poems about the British surrealist artist Eileen Agar. And I often just keep going. If I'm writing something, kind of, I keep going with that. So yes, this was part of an earlier sequence in the sense that the first letter in the book is the first letter that I wrote, and I think, in that sense, the form was kind of set out. And then, in terms of it being kind of, like, a longer shorter-lined poem, I was thinking a little bit about how if you unfold a letter from an envelope, you would have to do that with this poem. Mark: Oh, yes, I remember that. Suzannah: Yeah. And it can be quite tricky, actually. I find it quite tricky to fold letters so they fit correctly in their envelope. But yeah, there's something about that. Whereas the postcard poems, they are, like, poems that you could almost kind of fit to the back of a postcard. But the ones that kind of escape from that or kind of defy that form, I think, are also…that's interesting to me as well, kind of, to flip that. So, for example, I think the most…the postcard that, to me, is the crux of the middle section is the postcard on Christmas night, which is one that I had thought that I would not ever really want to read out loud because it's quite an intense poem. But I did read that one at the London launch for my book at Burley Fisher Books because I was kind of surrounded by people that I knew, and it felt right. But that poem is a much longer postcard. And again, I like the idea of a postcard where you're defying the amount of space that you have to write in. And again, I think that prose poems also do that, because there's a similar kind of sense of overspill in a prose poem, because you're tipping over that line end, and that's quite defiant as well. So I think, if you then tip over the form of the postcard, it's kind of a doubly defiant, formally, kind of way of writing. Mark: Thank you, Suzannah, for sharing such a personal and beautiful poem today and a joyful one. And I would encourage listeners to go and check out the rest of the book and see how it fits into the sequence, because this is really one of those books where the parts really do make up something bigger than the whole. So let's have another lesson to ‘Letter to My Mother'. Suzannah: Thank you.   Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans You, pedalling your armsabove your head in bed,that bad arm suddenlymobile and flexible.You, meeting me at school,feeling something stir, sprinting across the grass . . . the two of us laughing, Mr. Tarpin peeringquizzically from the gate.You, with your bright lipstick.You, with your hands like mine.You, with your floppy hat.You, with your easy laugh.You, with the ellipsesof your emails. Your strongfront crawl. Your assertivegestures as you motionthrough talk. Now, when I swim, the movement of my armsis for you. A high arc,fingertips cleaving bright.Shuddering kick of legs.The sea pool in Seixalis for you. Craggy rocksand my head dipped to blue.Grey crabs line the rocks:I think of the limpets that spot McClure's paintingwith the reading woman,sun hat, white paper sheaf.Memory of last summer,absorbed in Woolf outside.A sudden rush of windcaused the parasol to liftand your own hat to spin right up from your head – where it hovered longerthan seemed possible, black ribbon flapping. Porto Moniz   Under the Blue ‘Letter to My Mother' is from Under the Blue, published by Bloomsbury Poetry. Available from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry Amazon: UK | US Bookshop.org: UK   Suzannah V. Evans Suzannah V. Evans is a poet, researcher, and educator. Her debut collection Under the Blue is shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and her work has received the Ivan Juritz Prize and a Northern Writers' Award. Her poetry pamphlets are Brightwork and Marine Objects / Some Language. She teaches poetry in adult education and works with Poetry By Heart. suzannahvevans.com Photograph by Naomi Woddis   A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans Episode 90 Letter to My Mother by Suzannah V. Evans  Suzannah V. Evans reads ‘Letter to My Mother' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Under the BlueAvailable from: Under the Blue is available from: The publisher: Bloomsbury Poetry... 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Send a textAlexander Pope, whom some critics regard as the most important poet of the early 18th century, set out to comprehensively explain the rules that governed art, poetry, and humanity itself.  And, it turns out, they're all the same rules.Gretel le Maître Ponders Beauty, with Bede & other guestsGretel le Maître likes to look for the beauty and curiosities in life, one day at a...Listen on: Apple Podcasts SpotifySupport the showPlease like, subscribe, and rate the podcast on Apple, Spotify, YouTube Music, or wherever you listen. Thank you! If you enjoy the show, please consider supporting it with a small donation. Click the "Support the Show" button. So grateful! Or Buy Me a Coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/classicenglishliterature Email: classicenglishliterature@gmail.comFollow me on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.Podcast Theme Music: "Rejoice" by G.F. Handel, perf. The Advent Chamber OrchestraSubcast Theme Music: "Sons of the Brave" by Thomas Bidgood, perf. The Band of the Irish GuardsSound effects and incidental music: Freesounds.orgMy thanks and appreciation to all the generous providers!

Ahead of her new book What's So Great About the Great Books? coming out in April, Naomi Kanakia and I talked about literature from Herodotus to Tony Tulathimutte. We touched on Chaucer, Anglo-Saxon poetry, Scott Alexander, Shakespeare, William James, Helen deWitt, Marx and Engels, Walter Scott, Les Miserables, Jhootha Sach, the Mahabharata, and more. Naomi also talked about some of her working habits and the history and future of the Great Books movement. Naomi, of course, writes Woman of Letters here on Substack.TranscriptHenry Oliver: Today, I am talking with Naomi Kanakia. Naomi is a novelist, a literary critic, and most importantly she writes a Substack called Woman of Letters, and she has a new book coming out, What's So Great About the Great Books? Naomi, welcome.Naomi Kanakia: Thanks for having me on.Oliver: How is the internet changing the way that literature gets discussed and criticized, and what is that going to mean for the future of the Great Books?Kanakia: How is the internet changing it? I can really speak to only how it has changed it for me. I started off as a writer of young adult novels and science fiction, and there's these very active online fan cultures for those two things.I was reading the Great Books all through that time. I started in 2010 through today. In the 2010s, it really felt like there was not a lot of online discussion of classic literature. Maybe that was just me and I wasn't finding it, but it didn't necessarily feel like there was that community.I think because there are so many strong, public-facing institutions that discuss classic literature, like the NYRB, London Review of Books, a lot of journals, and universities, too. But now on Substack, there are a number of blogs—yours, mine, a number of other ones—that are devoted to classic literature. All of those have these commenters, a community of commenters. I also follow bloggers who have relatively small followings who are reading Tolstoy, reading Middlemarch, reading even much more esoteric things.I know that for me, becoming involved in this online culture has given me much more of an awareness that there are many people who are reading the classics on their own. I think that was always true, but now it does feel like it's more of a community.Oliver: We are recording this the day after the Washington Post book section has been removed. You don't see some sort of relationship between the way these literary institutions are changing online and the way the Great Books are going to be conceived of in the future? Because the Great Books came out of a an old-fashioned, saving-the-institutions kind of radical approach to university education. We're now moving into a world where all those old things seem to be going.Kanakia: Yes. I agree. The Great Books began in the University of Chicago and Columbia University. If you look into the history of the movement, it really was about university education and the idea that you would have a common core and all undergraduates would read these books. The idea that the Great Books were for the ordinary person was really an afterthought, at least for Mortimer Adler and those original Great Books guys. Now, the Great Books in the university have had a resurgence that we can discuss, but I do think there's a lot more life and vitality in the kind of public-facing humanities than there has been.I talked to Irina Dumitrescu, who writes for TLS (The Times Literary Supplement), LRB (The London Review of Books), a lot of these places, and she also said the same thing—that a lot of these journals are going into podcasts, and they're noticing a huge interest in the humanities and in the classics even at the same time as big institutions are really scaling back on those things. Humanities majors are dropping, classics majors are getting cut, book coverage at major periodicals is going down. It does seem like there are signals that are conflicting. I don't really know totally what to make of it. I do think there is some relation between those two things.Ted Gioia on Substack is always talking about how culture is stagnant, basically, and one of the symptoms of that is that “back list” really outsells “front list” for books. Even in 2010, 50 percent of the books that were sold were front-list titles, books that had been released in the last 18 months. Now it's something like only 35 percent of books or something like that are front-list titles. These could be completely wrong, but there's been a trend.I think the decrease in interest in front-list books is really what drives the loss of these book-review pages because they mostly review front-list books. So, I think that does imply that there's a lot of interest in old books. That's what our stagnant culture means.Oliver: Why do you think your own blog is popular with the rationalists?Kanakia: I don't know for certain. There was a story I wrote that was a joke. There are all these pop nonfiction books that aim to prove something that seems counterintuitive, so I wrote a parody of one of those where I aim to prove that reading is bad for you. This book has many scientific studies that show the more you read, the worse it is because it makes you very rigid.Scott Alexander, who is the archrationalist, really liked that, and he added me to his blog roll. Because of that, I got a thousand rationalist subscribers. I have found that rationalists at least somewhat interested in the classics. I think they are definitely interested in enduring sources of value. I've observed a fair amount of interest.Oliver: How much of a lay reader are you really? Because you read scholarship and critics and you can just quote John Gilroy in the middle of a piece or something.Kanakia: Yeah. That is a good question. I have definitely gotten more interested in secondary literature. In my book, I really talk about being a lay reader and personally having a nonacademic approach to literature. I do think that, over 15 years of being a lay reader, I have developed a lot of knowledge.I've also learned the kind of secondary literature that is really important. I think having historical context adds a lot and is invaluable. Right now I'm rereading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. When I first read it in 2010, I hardly knew anything about French history. I was even talking online with someone about how most people who read Les Miserables think it's set in the French Revolution. That's basically because Americans don't really know anything about French history.Everything makes just a lot more sense the more you know about the time because it was written for people in it. For people in 1860s France, who knew everything about their own recent history, that really adds a lot to it. I still don't tend to go that much into interpretive literature, literature that tries to do readings of the stories or tell me the meaning of the stories. I feel like I haven't really gotten that much out of that.Oliver: How long have you been learning Anglo-Saxon?Kanakia: I went through a big Anglo-Saxon phase. That was in 2010. It started because I started reading The Canterbury Tales in Middle English. There is a great app online called General Prologue created by one of your countrymen, Terry Richardson [NB it is Terry Jones], who loved Middle English. In this app, he recites the Middle English of the General Prologue. I started listening to this app, and I thought, I just really love the rhythms and the sounds of Middle English. And it's quite easy to learn. So then, I got really into that.And then I thought, but what about Anglo-Saxon? I'm very bad at languages. I studied Latin for seven years in middle school and high school. I never really got very far, but I thought, Anglo-Saxon has to be the easiest foreign language you can learn, right? So, I got into it.I cannot sight read Anglo-Saxon, but I really got into Anglo-Saxon poetry. I really liked the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. Most people probably would not like the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle because it's very repetitive, but that makes it great if you're a language learner because every entry is in this very repetitive structure. I just felt such a connection. I get in trouble when I say this kind of stuff, because I'm never quiet sure if it's 100 percent true. But it's certainly one of the oldest vernacular literatures in Europe. It's just so much older than most of the other medieval literature I've read. And it just was such a window into a different part of history I never knew about.Oliver: And you particularly like “The Dream of the Rood”?Kanakia: Yeah, “The Dream of the Rood” is my favorite Anglo-Saxon poem. “The Dream of the Rood” is a poem that is told from the point of view of Christ's cross. A man is having a dream. In this dream he encounters Christ's cross, and Christ's cross starts reciting to him basically the story of the crucifixion. At the end, the cross is buried. I don't know, it was just so haunting and powerful. Yeah, it was one of my favorites.Oliver: Why do you think Byron is a better poet than Alexander Pope?Kanakia: This is an argument I cannot get into. I think this is coming up because T. S. Eliot felt that Alexander Pope was a great poet because he really exemplified the spirit of the age. I don't know. I've tried to read Pope. It just doesn't do it for me. Whereas with Byron, I read Don Juan and found it entertaining. I enjoyed it. Then, his lyric poetry is just more entertaining to read. With Alexander Pope, I'm learning a lot about what kind of poetry people wrote in the 18th century, but the joy is not there.Oliver: Okay. Can we do a quick fire round where I say the name of a book and you just say what you think of it, whatever you think of it?Kanakia: Sure.Oliver: Okay. The Odyssey.Kanakia: The Odyssey. Oh, I love The Odyssey. It has a very strange structure, where it starts with Telemachus and then there's this flashback in the middle of it. It is much more readable than The Iliad; I'll say that.Oliver: Herodotus.Kanakia: Herodotus is wild. Going into Herodotus, I really thought it was about the Persian war, which it is, but it's mostly a general overview of everything that Herodotus knew, about anything. It's been a long time since I read it. I really appreciate the voice of Herodotus, how human it is, and the accumulation of facts. It was great.Oliver: I love the first half actually. The bit about the Persian war I'm less interested in, but the first half I think is fantastic. I particularly love the Egypt book.Kanakia: Oh yeah, the Egypt book is really good.Oliver: All those like giant beetles that are made of fire or whatever; I can't remember the details, but it's completely…Kanakia: The Greeks are also so fascinated by Egypt. They go down there like what is going on out there? Then, most of what we know about Egypt comes from this Hellenistic period, when the Greeks went to Egypt. Our Egyptian kings list comes from the Hellenistic period where some scholar decided to sort out what everybody was up to and put it all into order. That's why we have such an orderly story about Egypt. That's the story that the Greeks tried to tell themselves.Oliver: Marcus Aurelius.Kanakia: Marcus Aurelius. When I first read The Meditations, which I loved, obviously, I thought, “being the Roman emperor cannot be this hard.” It really was a black pill moment because I thought, “if the emperor of Rome is so unhappy, maybe human power really doesn't do it.”Knowing more about Marcus Aurelius, he did have quite a difficult life. He was at war for most of his—just stuck in the region in Germany for ages. He had various troubles, but yeah, it really was very stoic. It was, oh, I just have to do my duty. Very “heavy is the head that wears the crown” kind of stuff. I thought, “okay, I guess being Roman emperor is not so great.”Oliver: Omar Khayyam.Kanakia: Omar Khayyam. Okay, I've only read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald, which I loved, but I cannot formulate a strong opinion right now.Oliver: As You Like It.Kanakia: No opinions.Oliver: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.Kanakia: Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I do have an opinion about this, which is that they should make a redacted version of Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I normally am not a big believer in abridgements because I feel like whatever is there is there. But, Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, first of all, has a long portion before Boswell even meets Johnson. That portion drags; it's not that great. Then it has all these like letters that Johnson wrote, which also are not that great. What's really good is when Boswell just reports everything Johnson ever said, which is about half the book. You get a sense of Johnson's conversation and his personality, and that is very gripping. I've definitely thought that with a different presentation, this could still be popular. People would still read this.Oliver: The Communist Manifesto.Kanakia: The Communist Manifesto. It's very stirring. I love The Communist Manifesto. It has very haunting, powerful lines. I won't try to quote from it because I'll misquote them.Oliver: But it is remarkably well written.Kanakia: Oh yeah, it is a great work of literature.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: I read Capital [Das Kapital], which is not a great work of literature, and I would venture to say that it is not necessarily worth reading. It really feels like Marx's reputation is built on other political writings like The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and works like that, which really seem to have a lot more meat on the bone than Capital.Oliver: Pragmatism by William James.Kanakia: Pragmatism. I mean, I've mentioned that in my book. I love William James in general. I think William James was writing in this 19th-century environment where it seemed like some form of skepticism was the only rational solution. You couldn't have any source of value, and he really tried to cut through that with Pragmatism and was like, let's just believe the things that are good to believe. It is definitely at least useful to think, although someone else can always argue with you about what is useful to believe. But, as a personal guide for belief, I think it is still useful.Oliver: Major Barbara by George Bernard Shaw.Kanakia: No strong opinions. It was a long time ago that I read Major Barbara.Oliver: Tell me what you like about James Fenimore Cooper.Kanakia: James Fenimore Cooper. Oh, this is great. I have basically a list of Great Books that I want to read, but four or five years ago, I thought, “what's in all the other books that I know the names of but that are not reputed, are not the kind of books you still read?”That was when I read Walter Scott, who I really love. And I just started reading all kinds of books that were kind of well known but have kind of fallen into literary disfavor. In almost every case, I felt like I got a lot out of these books. So, nowadays when I approach any realm of literature, I always look for those books.In 19th-century American literature, the biggest no-longer-read book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, which was America's first bestseller. He was the first American novelist that had a high reputation in Europe. The Last of the Mohicans is kind of a historical romance, à la Walter Scott, but much more tightly written and much more tightly plotted.Cooper has written five novels, the Leatherstocking Tales, that are all centered around this very virtuous, rough-hewn frontiersman, Natty Bumppo. He has his best friend, Chingachgook, who is the last of the Mohicans. He's the last of his tribe. And the two of these guys are basically very sad and stoic. Chingachgook is distanced from his tribe. Chingachgook has a tribe of Native Americans that he hates—I want to say it's the Huron. He's always like, “they're the bad ones,” and he's always fighting them. Then, Natty Bumppo doesn't really love settled civilization. He's not precisely at war with it, but he does not like the settlers. They're kind of stuck in the middle. They have various adventures, and I just thought it was so haunting and powerful.I've been reading a lot of other 19th-century American literature, and virtually none of it treats Native Americans with this kind of respect. There's a lot of diversity in the Native American characters; there's really an attempt to show how their society works and the various ways that leadership and chiefship works among them. There's this very haunting moment in The Last of the Mohicans, where this aged chief, Tamenund, comes out and starts speaking. This is a chief who, in American mythology, was famous for being a friend to the white people. But, James Fenimore Cooper writing in the 1820s has Tamenund come out at 80 years old and say, “we have to fight; we have to fight the white people. That's our only option.” It was just such a powerful moment and such a powerful book.I was really, really enthused. I read all of these Leatherstocking Tales. It was also a very strange experience to read these books that are generally supposed to be very turgid and boring, and then I read them and was like, “I understand. I'm so transported.” I understand exactly why readers in the 1820s loved this.Oliver: Which Walter Scott books do you like?Kanakia: I love all the Walter Scott books I've read, but the one I liked best was Kenilworth. Have you ever read Kenilworth?Oliver: I don't know that one.Kanakia: Yeah, it's about Elizabeth I, who had a romantic relationship with one of her courtiers.Oliver: The Earl of Essex?Kanakia: Yeah. She really thought they were going to get married, but then it turned out he was secretly married. Basically, I guess the implication is that he killed his wife in order to marry Queen Elizabeth I. It's a novel all about him and that situation, and it just felt very tightly plotted. I really enjoyed it.Oliver: What did you think of Rejection?Kanakia: Rejection by Tony Tulathimutte? Initially when I read this book, I enjoyed it, but I was like, “life cannot possibly be this sad.” It's five or six stories about these people who just have nothing going on. Their lives are so miserable, they can't find anyone to sleep with, and they're just doomed to be alone forever. I was like, “life can't be this bad.” But now thinking back over it, it is one of the most memorable books I've read in the last year. It really sticks with you. I feel like my opinion of this book has gone up a lot in retrospect.Oliver: How antisemitic is the House of Mirth?Kanakia: That is a hotly debated question, which I mentioned in my book. I think there has been a good case made that Edith Wharton, the author of House of Mirth, who was from an old New York family, was herself fairly antisemitic and did not personally like Jewish people. What she portrays in this book is that this old New York society also was highly suspicious of Jewish people and was organized to keep Jewish people out.In this book there is a rich Jewish man, Simon Rosedale, and there's a poor woman, Lily Bart. Lily Bart's main thing is whether she's going to marry the poor guy, Lawrence Selden, or the rich guy, Percy Gryce. She can't choose. She doesn't want to be poor, but she also is always bored by the rich guys. Meanwhile, through the whole book, there's Simon Rosedale, who's always like, “you should marry me.” He's the rich Jewish guy. He's like, “you should marry me. I will give you lots of money. You can do whatever you want.”Everybody else kind of just sees her as a woman and as a wife; he really sees her as an ally in his social climbing. That's his main motivation. The book is relatively clear that he has a kind of respect for her that nobody else does. Then, over the course of the book, she also gains a lot more respect for him. Basically, late in the book, she decides to marry him, but she has fallen a lot in the world. He's like, “that particular deal is not available anymore,” but he does offer her another deal that—although she finds it not to her taste—is still pretty good.He basically is like, “I'll give you some money, you'll figure out how to rehabilitate your reputation, and later down the line, we can figure something out.” So, I think with a great author like Edith Wharton, there's power in these portrayals. I felt it hard to come away from it feeling like the book is like a really antisemitic book.Oliver: Now, you note that the Great Books movement started out as something quite socially aspirational. Do you think it's still like that?Kanakia: I do think so. Yeah. For me, that's 100 percent what it was because I majored in econ. I always felt kind of inadequate as a writer against people who had majored in English. Then I started off as a science fiction writer, young adult writer, and I was like, “I'm going to read all these Great Books and then I'll have read the books that everybody else has read.” In my mind, that's also what it was—that there was some upper crust or literary society that was reading all these Great Books.That's really what did it. I do think there's still an element of aspiration to it because it's a club that you can join, that anyone can join. It's very straightforward to be a Great Books reader, and so I think there's still something there. I think because the Great Books movement has such a democratic quality to it, it actually doesn't get you to the top socially, which has always been the true, always been the case. But, that's okay. As long as you end up higher than where you started, that's fine.Oliver: What makes a book great?Kanakia: I talk about it this in the book, and I go through many different authors' conceptions of what makes a book great or what constitutes a classic. I don't know that anyone has come up with a really satisfying answer. The Horatian formulation from Horace—that a book is great or an author is great if it has lasted for a hundred years—is the one that seems to be the most accurate. Like, any book that's still being read a hundred years after it was written has a greatness.I do think that T. S. Eliott's formulation—that a civilization at its height produces certain literature and that literature partakes of the greatness of the civilization and summarizes the greatness of the civilization—does seem to have some kind of truth to it.But it's hard, right? Because the greatest French novel is In Search of Lost Time, but I don't know that anyone would say that the France in the 1920s was at its height. It's not a prescriptive thing, but it does seem like the way we read many of these Great Books, like Moby Dick, it feels like you're like communing with the entire society that produced it. So, maybe there's something there.Oliver: Now, you've used a list from Clifton Fadiman.Kanakia: Yes.Oliver: Rather than from Mortimer Adler or Harold Bloom or several others. Why this list?Kanakia: Well, the best reason is that it's actually the list I've just been using for the last 15 years. I went to a science fiction convention in 2009, Readercon, and at this science fiction convention was Michael Dirda, who was a Washington Post book critic. He had recently come out with his book, Classics for Pleasure, which I also bought and liked. But he said that the list he had always used was this Clifton Fadiman book. And so when I decided to start reading the Great Books, I went and got that book. I have perused many other lists over time, but that was always the list that seemed best to me.It seemed to have like the best mix. There's considerable variation amongst these lists, but there's also a lot of overlap. So any of these lists is going to have Dickens on it, and Tolstoy, and stuff like that. So really, you're just thinking about, “aside from Dickens and Tolstoy and George Eliot and Walt Whitman and all these people, who are the other 50 authors that you're going be reading?”The Mortimer Adler list is very heavy on philosophy. It has Plotinus on it. It has all these scientific works. I don't know, it didn't speak to me as much. Whereas, this Clifton Fadiman and John Major list has all these Eastern works on it. It has The Tale of Genji, Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Story of the Stone, and that just spoke to me a little bit more.Oliver: What modern books will be on a future Great Books list, whether it's from someone alive or someone since the war.Kanakia: Have you ever heard of Robert Caro?Oliver: Sure.Kanakia: Yeah. I think his Lyndon Johnson books are great books. They have changed the field of biography. They're so complete, they seem to summarize an entire era, epoch. They're highly rated, but I feel like they're underrated as literature.What else? I was actually a little bit surprised in this Clifton Fadiman-John Major book, which came out in 1999, that there are not more African Americans in their list. Like, Invisible Man definitely seemed like a huge missed work. You know, it's hard. You would definitely want a book that has undergone enough critical evaluation that people are pretty certain that it is great. A lot of things that are more recent have not undergone that evaluation yet, but Invisible Man has, as have some works by Martin Luther King.Oliver: What about The Autobiography of Malcolm X?Kanakia: I would have to reread. I feel like it hasn't been evaluated much as a literary document.Oliver: Helen DeWitt?Kanakia: It's hard to say. It's so idiosyncratic, The Last Samurai, but it is certainly one of the best novels of the last 25 years.Oliver: Yeah.Kanakia: It is hard to say, because there's nothing else quite like it. But I would love if The Last Samurai was on a list like this; that would be amazing.Oliver: If someone wants to try the Great Books, but they think that those sort of classic 19th-century novels are too difficult—because they're long and the sentences are weird or whatever—what else should they do? Where else should they start?Kanakia: Well, it depends on what they're into, or it depends on their personality type. I think like there are people who like very, very difficult literature. There are people who are very into James Joyce and Proust. I think for some people the cost-benefit is better. If they're going to be pouring over some book for a long time, they would prefer if it was overtly difficult.If they're not like that, then I would say, there are many Great Books that are more accessible. Hemingway is a good one and Grapes of Wrath is wonderful. The 19th-century American books tend to be written in a very different register than the English books. If you read Moby Dick, it feels like it's written in a completely different language than Charles Dickens, even though they're writing essentially at the same time.Oliver: Is there too much Freud on the list that you've used?Kanakia: Maybe. I know that Interpretation of Dreams is on that list, which I've tried to read and have decided life is too short. I didn't really buy it, but I have read a fair amount of Freud. My impression of Freud was always that I would read Freud and somehow it would just seem completely fanciful or far out, like wouldn't ring true. But then when I started reading Freud, it was more the opposite. I was like, oh yeah, this seems very, very true.Like this battle between like the id and the ego and the super ego, and this feeling that like the psyche is at war with itself. Human beings really desire to be singular and exceptional, but then you're constantly under assault by the reality principle, which is that you're insignificant. That all seemed completely true. But then he tries to cure this somehow, which does not seem a curable problem. And he also situates the problem in some early sexual development, which also did not necessarily ring true. But no, I wouldn't say there's too much. Freud is a lot of fun. People should read Freud.Oliver: Which of the Great Books have you really not liked?Kanakia: I do get asked this quite a bit. I would say the Great Book that I really felt like—at least in translation—was not that rewarding in an unabridged version was Don Quixote. Because at least half the length of Don Quixote is these like interpolated novellas that are really long and tedious. I felt Don Quixote was a big slog. But maybe someday I'll go back and reread it and love it. Who knows?Oliver: Now you wrote that the question of biography is totally divorced from the question of what art is and how it operates. What do you think of George Orwell's supposition that if Shakespeare came back tomorrow, and we found out he used to rape children that we should—we would not say, you know, it's fine to carry on to doing that because he might write another King Lear.Kanakia: Well, if we discovered that Shakespeare was raping children, he should go to prison for that. No. It's totally divorced in both senses. You don't get any credit in the court of law because you are the writer of King Lear. If I murdered someone and then I was hauled in front of a judge and they were like, oh, Naomi's a genius, I wouldn't get off for murder. Nor should I get off for murder.So in terms of like whether we would punish Shakespeare for his crime of raping children, I don't think King Lear should count at all, but it's never used that way. It's never should someone go to prison or not for their crimes, because they're a genius. It's always used the other way, which is should we read King Lear knowing that the author raped children, but I also feel like that is immaterial. If you read King Lear, you're not enabling someone to rape children.Oliver: There's an almost endless amount of discussion these days about the Great Books and education and the value of the humanities, and what's the future of it all. What is your short opinion on that?Kanakia: My short opinion is that the Great Books at least are going to be fine. The Great Books will continue to be read, and they would even survive the university. All these books predate the university and they will survive the university. I feel like the university has stewarded literature in its own way for a while now and has made certain choices in that stewardship. I think if that stewardship was given up to more voluntary associations that had less financial support, then I think the choices would probably be very different. But I still think the greatest works would survive.Oliver: Now this is a quote from the book: “I am glad that reactionaries love the Great Books. They've invited a Trojan horse into their own camp.” Tell us what you mean by that.Kanakia: Let's say you believed in Christian theocracy, that you thought America should be organized on explicitly Christian principles. And because you believe in Christian theocracy, you organize a school that teaches the Great Books. Many of these schools that are Christian schools that have Great Books programs will also teach Nietzsche. They definitely put some kind of spin on Nietzsche. But they will teach anti-Christ, and that is a counterpoint to Christian morality and Christian theology. There are many things that you'll read in the Great Books that are corrosive to various kinds of certainties.If someone who I think is bad starts educating themselves in the Great Books, I don't think that the Great Books are going to make them worse from my perspective. So it's good.Oliver: How did reading the Mahabharata change you?Kanakia: Oh yeah, so the Mahabharata is a Hindu epic from, let's say, the first century AD. I'm Indian and most Indians are familiar with the basic outline of the Mahabharata story because it's told in various retellings, and there's a TV serial that my parents would rent from the Indian store growing up and we would watch it tape by tape. So I'm very familiar with it. Like there's never been a time I have not known this story.But I was also familiar with the idea that there is a written version in Sanskrit that's extremely long. It is 10 times as long as the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. This Mahabharata story is not that long. I've read a version of it that's about 800 pages long. So how could something that's 10 times this long be the same? A new unabridged translation came out 10 years ago. So I started reading it, and it basically contains the entire Sanskrit Vedic worldview in it.I had never been exposed to this very coherently laid-out version of what I would call Hindu cosmology and ethics. Hindus don't really get taught those things in a very organized way. The book is basically about dharma, the principle of rightness and how this principle of rightness orders the universe and how it basically results in everybody getting their just deserts in various ways. As I was reading the book, I was like, this seems very true that there is some cosmic rebalancing here, and that everything does turn out more or less the way it should, which is not something that I can defend on a rational level.But just reading the book, it just made me feel like, yes, that is true. There is justice, the universe is organized by justice. It took me about a year to read the whole thing. I started waking up at 5:00 a.m. and reading for an hour each morning, and it just was a really magical, profound experience that brought me a lot closer to my grandmother's religious beliefs.Oliver: Is it ever possible to persuade someone with arguments that they should read literature, or is it just something that they have to have an inclination toward and then follow someone's example? Because I feel like we have so many columns and op-eds and “books are good because of X reason, and it's very important because of Y reason.” And like, who cares? No one cares. If you are persuaded, you take all that very seriously and you argue about what exactly are the precise reasons we should say. And if you're not persuaded, you don't even know this is happening.And what really persuades you is like, oh, Naomi sounds pretty compelling about the Mahabharata. That sounds cool. I'll try that. It's much more of a temperamental, feelingsy kind of thing. Is it possible to argue people into thinking about this differently? Or should we just be doing what we do and setting an example and hoping that people will follow.Kanakia: As to whether it's possible or not, I do not know. But I do think these columns are too ambitious. A thousand-word column and the imagined audience for this column is somebody who doesn't read books at all, who doesn't care about literature at all. And then in a thousand-word column, you're going to persuade them to care about literature. This is no good. It's so unnecessary.Whereas there's a much broader range of people who love to read books, but have never picked up Moby Dick or have never picked up Middlemarch, or who like maybe loved Middlemarch, but never thought maybe I should then go on and read Jane Austen and George Eliot.I think trying to shift people from “I don't read books at all; reading books is not something I do,” to being a Great Books card-carrying lover of literature is a lot. I really aim for a much lower result than that, which is to whatever extent people are interested in literature, they should pursue that interest. And as the rationalists would say, there's a lot of alpha in that; there's a lot to be gained from converting people who are somewhat interested into people who are very interested.Oliver: If there was a more widespread practice of humanism in education and the general culture, would that make America into a more liberal country in any way?Kanakia: What do you mean by humanism?Oliver: You know, the old-fashioned liberal arts approach, the revival of the literary journal culture, the sort of depolitical approach to literature, the way things used to be, as it were.Kanakia: It couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt is my answer to that question.Oliver: Okay.Kanakia: What you're describing is basically the way I was educated. I went to Catholic school in DC at St. Anselm's Abbey School, in Northeast, DC, grade school. Highly recommend sending your little boys there. No complaints about the school. They talked about humanism all the time and all these civic virtues. I thought it was great. I don't know what people in other schools learn, but I really feel like it was a superior way of teaching.Now, you know, it was Catholic school, so a lot of people who graduated from my school are conservatives and don't really have the beliefs that I have, but that's okay.Oliver: Tell us about your reading habits.Kanakia: I read mostly ebooks. I really love ebooks because you can make the type bigger. I just read all the time. They vary. I don't wake up at 5:00 a.m. to read anymore. Sometimes if I feel like I'm not reading enough—because I write this blog, and the blog doesn't get written unless I'm reading. That's the engine, and so sometimes I set aside a day each week to read. But generally, the reading mostly takes care of itself.What I tend to get is very into a particular thing, and then I'll start reading more and more in that area. Recently, I was reading a lot of New Yorker stories. So I started reading more and more of these storywriters that have been published in the New Yorker and old anthologies of New Yorker stories. And then eventually I am done. I'm tired. It's time to move on.Oliver: But do you read several books at once? Do you make notes? Do you abandon books? How many hours a day do you read?Kanakia: Hours a day: Because my e-reader keeps these stats, I'd say 15 or 20 hours a week of reading. Nowadays because I write for the blog, I often think as I'm reading how I would frame a post about this. So I look for quotes, like what quote I would look at. I take different kinds of notes. I'll make more notes if I'm more confused by what is going on. Especially with nonfiction books, I'll try sometimes to make notes just to iron out what exactly I think is happening or what I think the argument is. But no, not much of a note taker.Oliver: What will you read next?Kanakia: What will I read next? Well, I've been thinking about getting back into Indian literature. Right now I'm reading Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. But there's an Indian novel called Jhootha Sach, which is a partition novel that is originally in Hindi. And it's also a thousand pages long, and is frequently compared to Les Miserables and War and Peace. So I'm thinking about tackling that finally.Oliver: Naomi Kanakia, thank you very much.Kanakia: Thanks for having me. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.commonreader.co.uk

Episode 89 From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope. https://media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/media.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/content.blubrry.com/amouthfulofair/89_From_An_Essay_on_Man_by_Alexander_Pope.mp3 Poet Alexander Pope Reading and commentary by Mark McGuinness From An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise, and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little, or too much:Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused, or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!   Podcast Transcript In the early 18th century, Alexander Pope's poetry was known to every cultured person in England. He was a fashionable, successful, wealthy writer and the preeminent poet of his age. He was also a canny businessman who published his translations of Homer via subscription, an early form of crowdfunding, and they sold so well he built himself, an extravagantly large villa in Twickenham – and its famous subterranean grotto still exists today. His political satires were so sharp and topical that he was rumoured to carry a pair of loaded pistols when going for a walk, in case one of his targets took violent exception. Phrases from his poetry are still proverbial: ‘hope springs eternal', ‘Fools rush in where angels fear to tread', ‘a little learning is a dangerous thing', ‘To err is human; to forgive divine', ‘What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed', and also the title of the movie, ‘eternal sunshine of the spotless mind'. But these days, Pope has really fallen out of fashion. He's seen as archaic and artificial. In an age when formal poetry is out of fashion, for many people he represents the worst kind of formal poetry: his very regular metre and full rhymes sound clunky to our ears. His rhyming couplets are undoubtedly clever, but that's part of the problem, because these days we associate poetry with emotions and self-expression, so cleverness is seen as a little suspect and somehow inauthentic. And I'll be honest, for a long time, I had that image of Pope. He represented everything the Romantics rebelled against at the end of the 18th century, and as a young poet I was on the side of the Romantics, so I had no interest in Pope. However, a few years ago, I challenged myself to have another look at his work, and what I discovered was a really sharp and thought-provoking and witty and formidably skilful poet, who in certain moods, is an absolute pleasure to read. And he doesn't fit every mood, but then there aren't many poets who do. So turning to today's poem, An Essay on Man is one of Pope's major works, it's about 1,300 lines long. As the title suggests it's a meditation on the nature of what he called mankind, and we call humankind, we have to make allowance for the historic focus on the male as representative of the species. It's also a didactic poem, he's not just reflecting on the subject, he is telling us what we should think about it. Which again, is a deeply unfashionable stance for poets these days, at least when they are on the side of a conservative or establishment position. And he does this in the form of a series of verse epistles, verse letters, which are addressed to Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. The epistle form also means that the poem addresses the reader in a very direct manner, as you would expect in a letter. His basic stance, which we find in many of his poems, is of a reasonable man writing for a group of like-minded people, trying to establish some sort of common sense, shared ideas and principles, in a world where these need to be debated and defined and defended. This was the world of the coffee house and the salon, where people came together to debate, sometimes in very robust fashion. It came to be known as the Augustan age in English literature, by comparison with the satirical and political poetry of the age of Augustus Caesar. OK looking more closely at the poem itself, the excerpt I just read is from the second Epistle, and one of the first things we notice is what Milton would have called the ‘jingling' rhymes: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride, It's pretty unmistakeable isn't it? One pair of rhymes after another. And in case you're wondering, yes, these rhyming couplets do go on all the way through the poem, and indeed all the way through most of Pope's work. And not just in Pope: for over a century, from about 1650 to 1780, this was a hugely popular verse form. They are known as heroic couplets because they are associated with epic narrative poems, such as John Dryden's translations of Virgil and Pope's translations of Homer. Each line is in iambic pentameter, the familiar ti TUM ti TUM ti TUm ti TUM ti TUM, with two lines next to each other forming couplets, and the poem proceeding with one couplet after another. The form can be traced back to Chaucer, who used rhyming couplets for many of his narrative poems. But by the time of Dryden and Pope it had evolved into a tighter couplet form, described as closed couplets, meaning that they were typically self contained, with a sentence, or a discrete part of a sentence, beginning and ending inside the couplet. For instance: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. That stands on its own as a single thought, a unit of sense, ending with a full stop. And the full rhyme of ‘scan' and ‘man' means the couplet snaps shut at the end – this is the closed couplet effect we associate with heroic couplets. In the next couplet he introduces the idea of man as a creature of ‘middle state': Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: And then another couplet elaborates on the sense of being pulled in different directions: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, So the poem proceeds one unit of sense at a time. The couplets are like Lego bricks, and Pope used them to build just about anything he wanted: literary and philosophical discourse here in the Essay on Man and in his Essay on Criticism; mock-heroic social comedy in The Rape of the Lock; actual epic in his translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey; and satire in The Dunciad. It's easy to see how this could become monotonous, and in the work of most poets of the time, it did. But Pope's great achievement was to take this established form and perfect it, sticking very strictly to the formal pattern, while varying the syntax, the grammatical patterns, with great subtlety and complexity, to keep the reader on their toes. Let's take another look at the first couplet. Notice the little pause in the middle of the first line, after ‘thyself': Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; This divides the line into two parts, conveying the dramatic tension in Pope's argument: he's saying that humans are ambitious for knowledge, they want to ‘scan' God, to examine him, but they should really focus on self-knowledge. This tension between opposites is known as antithesis, it's a rhetorical pattern we looked at back in episode 58 about one of Sir Philip Sidney's sonnets, and it's very common in Pope. And the tension is resolved in the next line, which is all one phrase, with no pause: The proper study of mankind is man. Have another listen to the couplet, to hear how the tension is established and then released: Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. So when all of this comes together, the tension and release, the regular rhythm of the metre and the full rhymes clinching the couplet, it has the effect of making the words sound truer than true. The following couplet picks up on the antithesis, and extends it into paradox: Placed on this isthmus of a middle state, A being darkly wise, and rudely great: An isthmus is a narrow strip of land between two bodies of water, so standing on it, you could easily feel precarious and threatened. ‘Darkly wise' means ‘dimly wise', possessing a little knowledge, but not enough for full understanding. And ‘rudely great' means ‘powerful but coarse and unfinished'. And I think we can recognise what Pope is saying from our own experience – that sense of knowing enough to know how little we really know; of having great potential, but struggling to fulfil it. And isn't it delightful how Pope compresses all those feelings into these neat little paradoxes: ‘darkly wise and rudely great'. In another famous line, he describes true eloquence as ‘What oft was thought but ne'er so well expressed', which is exactly what he achieves here. We can also note that ‘darkly wise' and ‘rudely great' are not only antitheses expressed as paradoxes, they are also an example of another rhetorical pattern: parallelism, where similar structures are repeated with variation. In this case ‘darkly' and ‘rudely' are both adverbs and ‘wise' and ‘great' are both adjectives, so grammatically they are identical, which suggests both similarity and difference in mankind's relationship to knowledge and power. The next couplet uses a more elaborate parallelism: With too much knowledge for the sceptic side, With too much weakness for the stoic's pride, So both lines say ‘With too much something for the something else'. It's hard to miss the pattern, isn't it? And notice how the couplet form is perfect for laying out two ideas that seem to counterbalance each other perfectly. So we're only six lines in and Pope has put his finger on a central conundrum in human existence, and conveyed it with at least three rhetorical patterns nested inside each other – antithesis, paradox and parallelism. Not only that, he's handled the metre and rhyme with great skill, wrapping each thought up in the neat little bow of a rhyming couplet. And if your mind is starting to boggle, welcome to the world of Pope's verse: elegant, authoritative and very, very clever. When we look closely, there's a lot going on inside every single couplet. He's like a watchmaker, working at a tiny scale, making an instrument with great precision and balance, that keeps perfect time, and chimes beautifully. And Pope's contemporaries would have found it easier to follow the sense than we do, because they were used to reading this kind of stuff. But I'm sure the poetry would often have given them pause, even if only for a moment, as they read. And my guess is that they would have enjoyed this slight difficulty, and the pleasure of making out the sense, with the little dopamine hit of understanding. Like unwrapping a sweet before you can pop it in your mouth and taste it. So I hope we're starting to see why Pope is the undisputed master of the heroic couplet. Even T. S. Eliot had to admit defeat, when he wrote a passage in this style for The Waste Land, only for Ezra Pound to point out tactfully that he couldn't compete with Pope, and draw the red pencil through it. But the form is more than simply one couplet after another. When he stacks them together, they create verse paragraphs, longer units of thought, that function very like paragraphs in prose. So having established the idea of man caught between opposing forces, he goes on to elaborate on the theme to dazzling effect: He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest; In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast; In doubt his mind or body to prefer; Born but to die, and reasoning but to err; Alike in ignorance, his reason such, Whether he thinks too little, or too much: The couplets are individually brilliant, and cumulatively overwhelming, both in terms of the mental effort required to tease out their meanings, and the tension between action and inaction, divine and bestial impulses, mind and body, birth and death, reason and error. And I think that's why I find this line so funny: Whether he thinks too little, or too much: It feels like he's throwing his arms up and laughing and admitting that he's overthinking it all. The verse paragraph ends with three more couplets, where he sums up the nature of man: Chaos of thought and passion, all confused; Still by himself abused, or disabused; Created half to rise, and half to fall; Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all; Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Although Pope is describing a ‘chaos of thought', his own thinking is always sharp, however convoluted his argument becomes. So he sticks to the themes of power and knowledge, undercutting man's pretension by saying he is ‘Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all', and ‘Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled'. And he ends this paragraph with another rhetorical device, the tricolon, which uses three parallel elements to build to a conclusion: The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! We're familiar with this pattern in famous quotes from Julius Caesar, ‘I came, I saw, I conquered', the US Declaration of Independence, ‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness', and Shakespeare: ‘Friends, Romans, countrymen!' Here, Pope uses it with typical precision, since if someone is both the ‘glory… of the world' and it's ‘jest', i.e. the butt of its jokes, then that makes that person a ‘riddle': The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! So this sums up the nature of man, and sets up the jesting irony of the next verse paragraph: Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides, Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides; Instruct the planets in what orbs to run, Correct old time, and regulate the sun; If this were the start of the poem, we might be forgiven for taking Pope's words at face value, but in the light of what has gone before, it's pretty clear that ‘wondrous creature' is a mocking criticism. He was writing this in an age where Newtonian physics was in the ascendancy and people were full of enthusiasm about the new discoveries in science and the possibility of understanding and mastering the physical world. And given that we are still living in a so-called age of reason, I think his criticisms of scientific overreach are still relevant, and the joke is still funny, when he talks about instructing the planets in what orbits to follow, correcting time and regulating the sun. As if measuring were full understanding, let alone complete power. But Pope doesn't confine his criticism to scientists. He also has philosophers in his sight: Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere, To the first good, first perfect, and first fair; Or tread the mazy round his followers trod, And quitting sense call imitating God; He clearly doesn't have a lot of time for Plato's first principles. Neither is he impressed by the contemporary vogue for what we would call Orientalism: As Eastern priests in giddy circles run, And turn their heads to imitate the sun. It's possible that he had in mind the whirling dervishes of Persia, or maybe this is just a caricature of his idea of ‘Eastern priests'. So obviously this is a joke that hasn't aged so well. OK he ends this verse paragraph with a final jab, which restates the idea from the opening couplet in bluntly comic fashion: Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule – Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! It's hard to imagine a more apt image of intellectual presumption than trying to teach Eternal Wisdom a thing or two, but just in case we miss the point, Pope rams it home with relish: Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! And this is another characteristic aspect of Augustan poetry, particularly the satirical kind, that it can be very crude and direct, with a passage of sophisticated argument followed by a line or two where the mask drops and the insult is laid bare. And no, it's not big or clever, but let's face it, sometimes it can be deeply satisfying. One more little detail, which I can't help wondering about: notice how both of these couplets, conveying the same basic idea in very different tones, both hinge on the word ‘thyself': Know then thyself, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is man. Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule – Then drop into thyself, and be a fool! So that word ‘thyself' could be used to refer to various individuals, and knowing Pope, I wouldn't be surprised if he intended all of them at once. Firstly, the phrasing sounds proverbial, in which case each couplet is an injunction to mankind at large. Secondly, it could refer to the reader, any reader, of the poem, whether Viscount Bolingbroke, an 18th-century wit, or you and me, reading the poem together on this podcast. It could also refer to the specific targets of Pope's criticism, such as the overreaching scientists or philosophers. I think Pope may also have had in mind a target nearer to home: himself. W. B. Yeats wrote in one of his essays, ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry'. And it's entirely possible that Pope is doing both at once: we've seen the brilliance of his rhetoric, in puncturing the pretensions of his fellow men and women. Yet by making poetry as well as rhetoric, he is arguably arguing with himself as well. It was of course be entirely right and proper and expected for a Christian such as Pope to admonish himself as well as others, for the many and various sins he describes in An Essay on Man. So from a moral viewpoint, I think I'm on pretty safe ground in suggesting that ‘thyself' includes Pope. But I would go further, and say that the idea of a brilliant mind that is not quite brilliant enough to fully understand itself may have been a deeply personal subject for Pope. Because what we have here is an extremely clever warning about taking cleverness to extremes. Maybe the irony was not lost on Pope. As he wrote in another poem, An Essay on Criticism, ‘A little learning is a dangerous thing'. So perhaps as we hear this passage again, and enjoy the sparkling wit and scurrilous attacks on others, we can also detect a note of self-reflection, and self-accusation, that makes it a little more poignant than it first appears. From An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;The proper study of mankind is man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise, and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,With too much weakness for the stoic's pride,He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little, or too much:Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused, or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:The glory, jest, and riddle of the world! Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th' empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule –Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!   Alexander Pope Alexander Pope was an English poet and translator who was born in 1688 and died in 1744. As a Catholic he was barred from university and public office, so he educated himself and forged a brilliant literary career, becoming the leading poet of Augustan England, celebrated for his razor-sharp satire and polished heroic couplets. Early success came with An Essay on Criticism and The Rape of the Lock, followed by monumental translations of Homer that made him financially independent. His later works, including The Dunciad, attacked dullness and corruption. In An Essay on Man, he explored human nature, providence, and moral order with epigrammatic clarity. He lived at Twickenham, where he created a famous garden and grotto.   A Mouthful of Air – the podcast This is a transcript of an episode of A Mouthful of Air – a poetry podcast hosted by Mark McGuinness. New episodes are released every other Tuesday. You can hear every episode of the podcast via Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts or your favourite app. You can have a full transcript of every new episode sent to you via email. The music and soundscapes for the show are created by Javier Weyler. Sound production is by Breaking Waves and visual identity by Irene Hoffman. A Mouthful of Air is produced by The 21st Century Creative, with support from Arts Council England via a National Lottery Project Grant. Listen to the show You can listen and subscribe to A Mouthful of Air on all the main podcast platforms Related Episodes From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Episode 89 From An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope Mark McGuinness reads and discusses an excerpt from Epistle II of An Essay on Man by Alexander Pope.Poet Alexander PopeReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessFrom An Essay on Man Epistle II By Alexander Pope Know... Occupied by Tim Rich Episode 88 Occupied by Tim Rich  Tim Rich reads ‘Occupied' and discusses the poem with Mark McGuinness.This poem is from: Dark Angels: Three Contemporary PoetsAvailable from: Dark Angels is available from: The publisher: Paekakariki Press Amazon: UK... Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold Episode 87 Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold  Mark McGuinness reads and discusses ‘Dover Beach' by Matthew Arnold.Poet Matthew ArnoldReading and commentary by Mark McGuinnessDover Beach By Matthew Arnold The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies...

"To err is human, to forgive, divine!" (Alexander Pope)

The panel discusses the second book of Alexander Pope's final Dunciad (of 1743), with attention to the historical personages who are satirised, including Flecknoe and Blackmore, and the effects that they had on later poets and on the English stage.Continue reading

From the September/October 2025 edition of The Scottish Rite Journal.  Any accompanying photographs or citations for this article can be found in the corresponding print edition.Make sure to like and subscribe to the channel!  Freemasons, make sure you shout out your Lodge, Valley, Chapter or Shrine below!OES, Job's Daughter's, Rainbow, DeMolay?  Drop us a comment too!To learn how to find a lodge near you, visit www.beafreemason.comTo learn more about the Scottish Rite, visit www.scottishrite.orgVisit our YouTube Page: Youtube.com/ScottishRiteMasonsJoin our Lost Media Archive for only $1.99 a month!https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv-F13FNBaW-buecl7p8cJg/joinVisit our new stores:Bookstore: https://www.srbookstore.myshopify.com/Merch Store: http://www.shopsrgifts.com/

Daily QuoteMan, like the generous vine, supported lives; the strength he gains is from the embrace he gives. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the Day脚步何其芳Beauty of WordsEugene O'Neil to His Son

Good morning friends and neighbors! This morning we are excited to welcome new guests to our program and to talk about an awesome upcoming event. On Friday, September 26th The RUSH Copley Foundation will host this year's Rock The Heart event at Two Brothers Roundhouse in Aurora.Today we will be speaking with Alexander Pope, Chief Development Officer and VP of Philanthropy and Community Engagement and Carmen Kaufman, Physician Assistant in Cardiology. Got questions? Send us an email to: goodmorningaurorail@gmail.comHave a great rest of the day! Good Morning Aurora will return with more news, weather and the very best of Aurora. Subscribe to the show on YouTube at this link: https://www.youtube.com/c/GoodMorningAuroraPodcastThe second largest city's first daily news podcast is here. Tune in 5 days a week, Monday thru Friday from 9:00 to 9:30 am. Make sure to like and subscribe to stay updated on all things Aurora.Threads: https://www.threads.net/@goodmorningaurorailInstagram: goodmorningaurorailSpotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6dVweK5Zc4uPVQQ0Fp1vEP...Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/.../good-morning.../id1513229463Anchor: https://anchor.fm/goodmorningauroraACTV (Aurora Community Television): https://www.aurora-il.org/309/Aurora-Community-TV#kanecountyil #bataviail #genevail #elginil #aurorail #auroraillinois #cityofaurorail #auroramedia #auroranews #morningnews #goodmorningaurora #tuesday #fyp

The panel discusses the first two cantos of Alexander Pope's heroi-comical peacemaker poem, with special attention to its use of foreshadowing, the style and tenor of its dialogue, and its allegedly Rosicrucian spiritology (and its textual origins).Continue reading

Daily QuoteAnd all our knowledge is, ourselves to know. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the Day寄黄几复黄庭坚Beauty of WordsThe Age of Innocence – Chapter 3Edith Wharton

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for June 22, 2025 is: bemuse • bih-MYOOZ • verb If you are bemused by something, you are confused or bewildered by it, and often also somewhat amused. // The contestant seemed somewhat bemused by the question, but gave the correct answer. See the entry > Examples: “The duck touched down on the surface of Raymond James Stadium just minutes before the Bucs scored their own touchdown. ... Many of the staff not assigned to work on the field were bemused by the sight of Anchor carrying a duck out of the stadium. They held cellphones and took pictures.” — Rick Stroud, The Tampa Bay (Florida) Times, 1 Jan. 2025 Did you know? In 1735, British poet Alexander Pope lamented, in rhyme, being besieged by “a parson much bemus'd in beer.” The cleric in question was apparently one of a horde of would-be poets who pestered Pope with requests that he read their verses. Pope meant that the parson had found his muse—his inspiration—in beer. That use of bemused harks back to a 1705 letter in which Pope wrote of “Poets … irrecoverably Be-mus'd.” In both letter and poem, Pope used bemused to allude to being inspired by or devoted to one of the Muses, the Greek sister goddesses of art, music, and literature. The lexicographers who followed him, however, interpreted “bemus'd in beer” as meaning “left confused by beer,” and their confusion gave rise to the “bewilder” sense of bemuse. The newer (and very common) use of bemuse to mean “to cause to have feelings of wry or tolerant amusement” is a topic of some dispute, as discussed here.

In this episode, we talk about these transitional chapters between the events at Lyme and the move to Bath. We consider the position of the old nurse in the Musgrove household, how Anne is feeling a bit sorry for herself, the delightful scenes with the Crofts and with Charles and Mary, how Mr Elliot is described as ‘underhung', and the way Anne and Mr Elliot get on well with each other.The characters we discuss are Mr and Mrs Musgrove. In the historical section, Ellen talks about Bath, and for popular culture Harriet discusses the 2019 YouTube series Rational Creatures.Things we mention:General discussion:Janet Todd and Antje Blank [Editors], The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Jane Austen: Persuasion (2006)Noel Streatfeild, Gran-Nannie (1976) and Ballet Shoes (1936)Novels of Charlotte M. YongeEvelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)Alexander Pope, ‘The Rape of the Lock‘ (1712)Historical discussion:The Venerable Bede (c.672-735)Nennius (9th century Welsh monk)Google map of locations in Persuasion, zoomed in on BathPopular culture discussion:Rational Creatures (2019, YouTube) – starring Kristina Pupo and Peter GiesslHarriet's interview with the creators of Rational CreaturesCreative commons music used:Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 12 in F Major, ii. Adagio.Extract from Joseph Haydn, Piano Sonata No. 38. Performance by Ivan Ilić, recorded in Manchester in December, 2006. File originally from IMSLP.Extract from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Sonata No. 13 in B-Flat Major, iii. Allegretto Grazioso. File originally from Musopen.Extract from George Frideric Handel, Suite I, No. 2 in F Major, ii. Allegro. File originally from Musopen.Extract from Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major. File originally from Musopen.

In 1710, the British Parliament passed a piece of legislation entitled An Act for the Encouragement of Learning. It became known as the Statute of Anne, and it was the world's first copyright law. Copyright protects and regulates a piece of work - whether that's a book, a painting, a piece of music or a software programme. It emerged as a way of balancing the interests of authors, artists, publishers, and the public in the context of evolving technologies and the rise of mechanical reproduction. Writers and artists such as Alexander Pope, William Hogarth and Charles Dickens became involved in heated debates about ownership and originality that continue to this day - especially with the emergence of artificial intelligence. With:Lionel Bently, Herchel Smith Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of CambridgeWill Slauter, Professor of History at Sorbonne University, ParisKatie McGettigan, Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. Producer: Eliane GlaserReading list:Isabella Alexander, Copyright Law and the Public Interest in the Nineteenth Century (Hart Publishing, 2010)Isabella Alexander and H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui (eds), Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2016)David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, Who Owns this Sentence? A History of Copyrights and Wrongs (Mountain Leopard Press, 2024)Oren Bracha, Owning Ideas: The Intellectual Origins of American Intellectual Property, 1790-1909 (Cambridge University Press, 2016)Elena Cooper, Art and Modern Copyright: The Contested Image (Cambridge University Press, 2018)Ronan Deazley, On the Origin of the Right to Copy: Charting the Movement of Copyright Law in Eighteenth Century Britain, 1695–1775 (Hart Publishing, 2004)Ronan Deazley, Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)Ronan Deazley, Martin Kretschmer and Lionel Bently (eds.), Privilege and Property: Essays on the History of Copyright (Open Book Publishers, 2010)Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter (eds.), Circulation and Control: Artistic Culture and Intellectual Property in the Nineteenth Century (Open Book Publishers, 2021) Melissa Homestead, American Women Authors and Literary Property, 1822-1869 (Cambridge University Press, 2005)Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (University of Chicago Press, 2009)Meredith L. McGill, American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002)Mark Rose, Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 1993)Mark Rose, Authors in Court: Scenes from the Theater of Copyright (Harvard University Press, 2018)Catherine Seville, Internationalisation of Copyright: Books, Buccaneers and the Black Flag in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2006)Brad Sherman and Lionel Bently, The Making of Modern Intellectual Property Law (Cambridge University Press, 1999)Will Slauter, Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford University Press, 2019)Robert Spoo, Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing and the Public Domain (Oxford University Press, 2013)In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio production

Kerri is a naturopath, herbalist and menstrual health women's wisdom educator living and working on Darug and Guringai Country. She holds an Advanced Diploma of Naturopathy from Nature Care College and completed post-graduate studies in Western Herbal Medicine at the University of New England in Armidale with commendation. Kerri is passionate about helping women heal and reconnect to their bodies and the rhythms of the natural world. She supports women by using a beautiful and unique combination of naturopathic medicine, western herbal medicine, holistic nutrition, flower essences, iridology, counselling and menstrual cycle awareness so that they can live their fullest, most vibrant lives. She can often be found bushwalking, foraging, making medicines or sitting in a cosy spot with a book and a cat or two.During this chat we talk about how menstrual cycle awareness can be such a beautiful tool for encouraging us to pause and reflect. Helping us to assess what our needs are during different phases and stages. Kerri shares a powerful way of looking at the menstrual mandala to reflect on opposite sides of the cycle- helping us see for example that overgiving during or around ovulation can result in flaring of symptoms (like pain, insomnia, PMS) during our menstrual phase.Kerri's passionate about supporting women through Perimenopause and she shares so much wisdom about caring for ourselves during this transition. **SHOW NOTES**Kerri shares a book by Alexander Pope called Wise Power- Discover the Liberating Power of Menopause**CONNECT**You can connect with Kerri via her website here, on facebook here and instagram here.You can connect with JESS via instagram and facebook here and here,  join her newsletter community here, buy her handmade herbal products here or book an appointment here.**BUY ME A CUPPA**If you liked the episode and want more, a cuppa fuels my work and time, which is given for free. Leave a comment and a few bucks here: https://buymeacoffee.com/theeldertree**THE ELDER TREE TROVE PATREON COMMUNITY**You can join our Patreon ⁠⁠here⁠⁠ and gain a deeper connection to our podcast. Pay only $2 per week to have access to bonus and often exclusive resources and opportunities- plus support the Elder tree at the same time! To find out more about The Elder Tree visit the website at ⁠www.theeldertree.org⁠ and donate to the crowdfunding campaign ⁠here⁠.You can also follow The Elder Tree on ⁠Facebook⁠ and ⁠Instagram⁠ and ⁠sign up to the newsletter⁠.Find out more about this podcast and the presenters ⁠here⁠. Get in touch with The Elder Tree at:  ⁠asktheeldertree@gmail.com⁠The intro and outro song is "⁠Sing for the Earth⁠" and was kindly donated by Chad Wilkins.  You can find Chad's music ⁠here⁠ and ⁠here⁠.

To expect women and men of flesh and blood to live lives of ethical perfection is to expect too much. Lapses in judgment, ignorance, vice, and sin are inescapable parts of the human condition. Each year, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, we recite the Al Het prayer, enumerating over 40 sins that we have committed. Sinning is natural, or, as the poet Alexander Pope famously put it, “to err is human, to forgive divine.” And there's a deep truth to that, for while error and vice are natural to the human condition, religion has introduced into the moral landscape the human imitation of God's compassion that releases us, and allows us to release one another, from the crushing burden of guilt and vice. That religious innovation is forgiveness, and it plays a central role in the ethical life of Jews and Christians. A society without forgiveness, in which moral stain can never be wiped away, in which no mechanism for absolution exists, is a society that will grow fearful, fragmented, feeble, and frail. A society that is properly calibrated to the inescapable truths of human sin, and also has an instrument that absolves the sinner and and enable him or her to rejoin society, is resilient. A few years ago, American was bound up in a spate of so-called cancellations in which public figures stood accused of some wrong action, wrong statement, or wrong thought, and were deemed unfit for employment or standing in society. And, in the progressive circles that led these efforts to purify the public arena, no apology would suffice. No cleansing was sufficient to remove the stain: once a bigot, always a bigot. It was around that time that a group of Jewish and Christian theologians began meeting to discuss the idea of forgiveness. Over the course of several years of study, reading, and discussion, a statement emerged. “Forgiveness: A Statement by Jews and Christians” was published in the February 2025 issue of First Things magazine. But of course, something of civilizational significance happened while this group convened, and that was the October 7 Hamas attacks, and the adulation of the attackers by American and European activists. In the face of such evil, could forgiveness be offered? Should it be? What are the limitations on forgiveness and what are the moral obligations on the part of the penitent seeking forgiveness? Two of the statement's signatories, Tikvah's chief education officer Rabbi Mark Gottlieb and the Villanova University professor Anna Moreland, join Mosaic's editor Jonathan Silver to discuss these and related themes.

The life of this week's final Scriblerian, Thomas Parnell, rounds out the picture of the entire Scriblerus club as a fraternity of wildly brilliant men all carrying some great pain or wound. Some of them clearly write out of that wound, while others seem to write in spite of it. Parnell straddles the line, and today's poem is a fine example of his blending of bright energy with a sharp edge. Happy reading.Thomas Parnell (11 September 1679 – 24 October 1718) was an Anglo-Irish poet and clergyman who was a friend of both Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift.He was born in Dublin, the eldest son of Thomas Parnell (died 1685) of Maryborough, Queen's County (now Portlaoise, County Laois), a prosperous landowner who had been a loyal supporter of Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War and moved from Congleton, Cheshire to Ireland after the Restoration of Charles II. His mother was Anne Grice of Kilosty, County Tipperary: she also owned property in County Armagh, which she left to Thomas at her death in 1709. His parents married in Dublin in 1674. Thomas was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and collated as Archdeacon of Clogher in 1705. In the last years of the reign of Queen Anne of England he was a popular preacher, but her death put an end to his hope of career advancement. He married Anne (Nancy) Minchin, daughter of Thomas Minchin, who died in 1712, and had three children, two of whom died young. The third child, a girl, is said to have reached a great age. The marriage was a very happy one, and it has been said that Thomas never recovered from Nancy's early death.He spent much of his time in London, where he participated with Pope, Swift and others in the Scriblerus Club, contributing to The Spectator and aiding Pope in his translation of The Iliad. He was also one of the so-called "Graveyard poets": his 'A Night-Piece on Death,' widely considered the first "Graveyard School" poem, was published posthumously in Poems on Several Occasions, collected and edited by Alexander Pope and is thought by some scholars to have been published in December 1721. It is said of his poetry, "it was in keeping with his character, easy and pleasing, enunciating the common places with felicity and grace."-bio via Wikipedia This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was notorious for embroiling himself in literary-political controversy–his sharp pen writing scathing checks his 4'6” frame couldn't necessarily cash. Today's poem is selected from his response to a friend who suggested he tone it down. Happy reading. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

The panel reads Alexander Pope's "Messiah," based upon Virgil's Fourth Eclogue and the biblical Book of Isaiah, with a discussion of its formal qualities, its Late Augustan/pre-Romantic historical context, and its fusion of Classical and Hebraic imagery.Continue reading

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 22, 2024 is: ambient • AM-bee-unt • adjective In technical use, ambient describes things—such as air quality or light in a room—that exist or are present on all sides. Ambient is also used to describe electronic music that is quiet and relaxing, with melodies that repeat many times. // The chemicals must be kept at an ambient temperature of 70°F. See the entry > Examples: “Many New Yorkers revel in the city's ambient rumble—the thump of a bass echoing between buildings, the slap of domino tiles on a card table, the growl of off-road bikes rushing down the block.” — Yessenia Funes, Curbed, 11 Aug. 2023 Did you know? Biologists explore the effects of ambient light on plants; acoustics experts try to control ambient sound; and meteorologists monitor the temperature of ambient air. All this can make ambient seem like a technical term, but when it first saw light of day, that all-encompassing adjective was as likely to be used in poetry as in science, as when Alexander Pope wrote of a mountain “whose tow'ring summit ambient clouds conceal'd.” Both poets and scientists use ambient today to describe things that surround—that is, exist on all sides of—someone or something. And by “all” we mean all. One would not likely describe someone sitting in the middle of their lawn as being amid “ambient grass,” for example. Ambient, which comes from the Latin verb ambīre meaning “to surround, encircle, or embrace,” most often describes things—such as noise or humidity—that are all around someone, from top to bottom.

Or Sinister Smurfs, Guffawstrengthtraining Seen, Al Pontiff, Charlatan John.

Alexander Pope observed in his poem “An Essay on Man” that “hope springs eternal in the human heart.” This sentiment is as relevant today as

In this episode, I review the pathological and clinical dimensions of migraine, the most common disabling neurological disorder. I tried to capture migraine's diverse disabling recurrent symptoms, from its risk factors, triggers and prodrome to the aura, the headache, and multiple heightened sensitivities.To illustrate the lived experience of migraine, its classical manifestations, and its curious variants, I refer to such vivid patient memoirs as those of Monica Nelson titled Mere Sense, and Abby Reed titled The Color of Pain. I also cited Oliver Sacks classical book titled 'Migraine'.I also flavour the podcast with historical migraine patient anecdotes, such as those of Ann Conway, the enlightenment writer who was treated by the great physicians William Harvey and Thomas Willis, of Annie, who was treated with an astounding number of therapies by the famous Queen Square neurologist William Gowers, and of Alexander Pope who treated his migraines in a most unconventional way.In this regard, I relied on Migraine: A History, Katherine Foxhall's magnificent historical account of the medieval ideas and treatments of the disorder, and Soul Made Flesh, Carl Zimmer's exhilarating biography of Thomas Willis.The podcast also explores and the evolution of migraine's acute and preventative treatments, and how a better understanding of its pathology is leading to treatments such as those that influence the CGRP pathway.

Today's crossword was filled with amusing and tricky clues, like 46D, "Charms strike the sight, but _______ wins the soul": Alexander Pope, MERIT; and a nice combo, 7D, Branching point, NODE, and 8D, Branching point?, TREE (ha!). But these are just a few of the stellar clues in today's crossword, even better ones lie within, so download today's podcast for even more enlightenment. And -- bonus! -- in that same download you will be able to discover who won our latest JAMCOTWA™ (Jean And Mike Crossword Of The Week Award).Show note imagery: NUUK, Greenland's capitalWe love feedback! Send us a text...Contact Info:We love listener mail! Drop us a line, crosswordpodcast@icloud.com.Also, we're on FaceBook, so feel free to drop by there and strike up a conversation!

Send us a textDetails of Eliza Haywood's life may be murky today, but in the early 18th century, she was a literary force—writing plays and bestselling novels, editing periodicals, and ruffling the feathers of male contemporaries like Alexander Pope. Academic Kelly J. Plante joins us this week to discuss Haywood's anonymous wartime writing for The Female Spectator, the first periodical written by and for women, as well as her 1751 novel, The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless.Mentioned in this episode:Kelly J. Plante's recent scholarship on Eliza Haywood in Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary JournalEliza Haywood: Love in Excess Fantomina The History of Miss Betsy ThoughtlessThe Female Spectator: Book 14, Letter 1The ParrotEpistles for the LadiesSamuel Richardson: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded Clarissa; or the History of a Young LadyDaniel Defoe: Robinson CrusoeAlexander Pope:The DunciadHenry Fielding:The History of Tom JonesFrances BurneyJane AustenThe Sound of Music's “Sixteen Going on Seventeen”“The Things We Do For Love” by 10ccLost Ladies of Lit Episode No. 49 on Aphra BehnSupport the showFor episodes and show notes, visit: LostLadiesofLit.comDiscuss episodes on our Facebook Forum. Follow us on instagram @lostladiesoflit. Follow Kim on twitter @kaskew. Sign up for our newsletter: LostLadiesofLit.com Email us: Contact — Lost Ladies of Lit Podcast

What makes normal people do terrible things? Are there really bad apples — or just bad barrels? And how should you deal with a nefarious next-door neighbor? SOURCES:Jonathan Haidt, professor of ethical leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business.Christina Maslach, professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley.Stanley Milgram, 20th century professor of psychology at Yale University.Edward R. Murrow, 20th century American broadcast journalist and war correspondent.Alexander Pope, 17-18th century English poet.Adrian Raine, professor of criminology, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.Oskar Schindler, 20th century German businessman.Philip Zimbardo, professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. RESOURCES:"Mental Illness and Violence: Debunking Myths, Addressing Realities," by Tori DeAngelis (Monitor on Psychology, 2021)."How 'Evil' Became a Conservative Buzzword," by Emma Green (The Atlantic, 2017)."The Double-Edged Sword: Does Biomechanism Increase or Decrease Judges' Sentencing of Psychopaths?" by Lisa G. Aspinwall, Teneille R. Brown, and James Tabery (Science, 2012)."The Psychology of Evil," by Philip Zimbardo (TED Talk, 2008).The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, by Philip Zimbardo (2007)."When Morality Opposes Justice: Conservatives Have Moral Intuitions that Liberals may not Recognize," by Jonathan Haidt and Jesse Graham (Social Justice Research, 2007)."Abu Ghraib Whistleblower Speaks Out," by Michele Norris (All Things Considered, 2006).Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View, by Stanley Milgram (1974). EXTRAS:"Does Free Will Exist, and Does It Matter?" by No Stupid Questions (2024)."Are You Suffering From Burnout?" by No Stupid Questions (2023).Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov (1955)."Essay on Man, Epistle II," poem by Alexander Pope (1733).

“When force of circumstance upsets your equanimity lose no time in recovering your self-control, and do not remain out of tune longer than you can help. Habitual recurrence to the harmony will increase your mastery of it.” – Marcus Aurelius   In This Episode, We Get Stoic About:   Self-control is not a static state.  We all mess up from time to time. We skip a workout. We hit the snooze button. We lose our temper. We overindulge food or drink. To err, as the Alexander Pope poem reminds us, is human.      But while it is our nature to err on occasion, it is also within us to correct the course when we do.   We talk about the importance of showing up again on today's podcast!   Resources + Links:   Connect with Kristofor | www.kristoforhealey.com Connect with Kristofor on Instagram | @team_healey Subscribe to The Stoic Responder on Substack | https://thestoicresponder.substack.com Subscribe to The Stoic Responder on YouTube | The Stoic Responder Buy your copy of In Valor: 365 Stoic Meditations for First Responders, here! Buy your copy of Indispensable: A Tactical Plan for the Modern Man, here! Book Kristofor for a speaking event, here!   Sponsor Discounts:    Friend of the show Dan Hickman (@danieljasonhickman on Instagram) hosts the Competitive Edge Podcast and is a father, entrepreneur and hybrid athlete. As a MyZone Ambassador, Dan is offering The Stoic Responder Podcast listeners $60 off of a MyZone heart rate monitor using discount code TMZUS001-51445-60. If you aren't using a heart rate monitor to train, you're missing out on critical data. Through accurate heart rate tracking and real-time feedback, all effort counts.   Takeaways:   Self-control is essential for maintaining balance in life. Recognizing when we are off track is crucial for improvement. Habitual recurrence to harmony increases mastery over self-control. It's natural to err, but we must correct our course quickly. Journaling helps in assessing our daily actions and behaviors. We should not let setbacks become the new normal. Discipline is required to get back on track after falling off. Recommitting to positive habits is a sign of strength. Philosophy should be practiced daily for it to be effective.   Until Next Time…out of role! 

Daily QuotePleasures are ever in our hands or eyes,And when in act they cease,In prospect rise. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the DayIn Heraclitus' RiverWisława SzymborskaBeauty of Words秋丰子恺

Daily QuoteHe who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the DayGoing and Stayingby Thomas HardyBeauty of WordsThe Last Night of the WorldRay Bradbury

Daily QuoteHe who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the DayThe Best Time of the DayRaymond CarverBeauty of WordsOf Fortuneby Francis Bacon

All seems infected that th' infected spy, As all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye. —Alexander Pope

Daily QuoteHe who rides and keeps the beaten track studies the fences chiefly. (Alexander Pope)Poem of the DayOn a Faded VioletP.B. ShelleyBeauty of WordsLoveRalph Waldo Emerson

Does knowing a lot of facts about the historical past – say, of early America – make us feel closer to it? Or is something else required? How can we–as my guest puts it, “appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive then. Naturally,” he continues  “we can't teach emotions to any who weren't alive to experience them how Pearl Harbor felt in real time – let alone Fort Sumter or Lincoln‘s assassination – is not transmissible. The historian can only do so much.“ But how to convey not merely the intellectual weight but the emotional burdens that humans once carried–and that we might no longer understand? My guest Andrew Burstein has done what he can to credibly bring early America closer to us in his new book Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories, and Emotional Loss in Early America. It is a work of history that is intricately plotted, connecting personalities and themes in a sort of great circular panopticon of early America, in which the reader sits at the orbital center of continual swirl and movement.   Andrew Burstein is the Charles Phelps Manship Emeritus Professor in the Department of History at Louisiana State University. Longing for Connection is the latest member of a large-and hopefully happy- family of books.   For Further Investigation You really should read some Alexander Pope. Find more about him, and some of his poems here. Poor Edward Everett. No one ever reads his Gettysburg address.  Some of the more closely related members of the Burstein family of books, many of them mentioned in the conversation, listed in order of publication: The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist; Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image; The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving; and Lincoln Dreamt He Died: The Midnight Visions of Remarkable Americans from Colonial Times to Freud For an intro to cultural history, you should listen to Episode 32 Past episodes with a connection to this one are Episode 163: The First Martyr of the American Revolution; and Episode 344: Founding Scoundrels

Nobody hated better than Alexander Pope. Despite his reputation as the quintessentially refined versifier of the early 18th century, he was also a class A, ultra-pure, surreal, visionary mega-hater, and The Dunciad is his monument to the hate he felt for almost all the other writers of his time. Written over fifteen years of burning fury, Pope's mock-epic tells the story of the Empire of Dullness and its lineage of terrible writers, the Dunces. Unlike other satires featured in this series so far, it makes no effort to hide the identities of its targets. Clare and Colin provide an ABC for understanding this vast and knotty fulmination, and explore the feverish, backstabbing and politically turbulent world in which it was created.This is an extract from the episode. To listen in full, and to all our other Close Readings series, sign up:Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3pJoFPqIn other podcast apps: lrb.me/closereadingsColin Burrow and Clare Bucknell are both fellows of All Souls College, Oxford.Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On this week's episode of The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas continue their series of discussions on Anne Brontë's novel Agnes Grey. They open the conversation about this novel with some thoughts on the differences between Agnes Grey and Jane Eyre and Anne and Charlotte Brontë. Angelina poses the question as to whether this novel crosses the line into didacticism or if it stays within the purpose of the story and the art. In discussing the education of Agnes' charges in these chapters, Angelina has a chance to expand upon the upbringing of Victorian young women. She and Thomas discuss the position of the curate and Agnes' spiritual seriousness, as well as the characters of Weston and Hatfield as foils for each other. Thomas closes out the conversation with a question as to whether Agnes Grey is as memorable a character as Jane Eyre or Catherine Earnshaw and why that is. Check out the schedule for the podcast's summer episodes on our Upcoming Events page. In July, Dr. Jason Baxter will be teaching a class titled “Dostoyevsky's Icon: Brothers Karamazov, The Christian Past, and The Modern World”, and you can sign up for that or any of the HHL Summer Classes here. Sign up for the newsletter at HouseofHumaneLetters.com to stay in the know about all the exciting new things we have coming up! Commonplace Quotes: In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts/ Is not the exactness of peculiar parts;/ ‘Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,/ But the joint force and full result of all. Alexander Pope, from “An Essay on Criticism” In any case, it is Charlotte Brontë who enters Victorian literature. The shortest way of stating her strong contribution is, I think, this: that she reached the highest romance through the lowest realism. She did not set out with Amadis of Gaul in a forest or with Mr. Pickwick in a comic club. She set out with herself, with her own dingy clothes and accidental ugliness, and flat, coarse, provincial household; and forcibly fused all such muddy materials into a spirited fairy-tale. G. K. Chesterton, The Victorian Age in Literature My Heart Leaps Up By William Wordsworth My heart leaps up when I beholdA Rainbow in the sky:So was it when my life began;So is it now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,Or let me die!The Child is father of the man;And I wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety. Book List: Ten Novels and Their Authors by W. Somerset Maugham 1984 by George Orwell The Jungle by Upton Sinclair Charlotte Mason Hugh Walpole George Eliot Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë Support The Literary Life: Become a patron of The Literary Life podcast as part of the “Friends and Fellows Community” on Patreon, and get some amazing bonus content! Thanks for your support! Connect with Us: You can find Angelina and Thomas at HouseofHumaneLetters.com, on Instagram @angelinastanford, and on Facebook at www.facebook.com/ANGStanford/ Follow The Literary Life on Instagram, and jump into our private Facebook group, The Literary Life Discussion Group, and let's get the book talk going! http://bit.ly/literarylifeFB

Today's poem (from an oft-maligned poet) makes frequent appearances in poetry anthologies for children, but hides a satisfying subtlety.Colley Cibber (6 November 1671 – 11 December 1757) was an English actor-manager, playwright and Poet Laureate. His colourful memoir An Apology for the Life of Colley Cibber (1740) describes his life in a personal, anecdotal and even rambling style. He wrote 25 plays for his own company at Drury Lane, half of which were adapted from various sources, which led Robert Lowe and Alexander Pope, among others, to criticise his "miserable mutilation" of "crucified Molière [and] hapless Shakespeare".He regarded himself as first and foremost an actor and had great popular success in comical fop parts, while as a tragic actor he was persistent but much ridiculed. Cibber's brash, extroverted personality did not sit well with his contemporaries, and he was frequently accused of tasteless theatrical productions, shady business methods, and a social and political opportunism that was thought to have gained him the laureateship over far better poets. He rose to ignominious fame when he became the chief target, the head Dunce, of Alexander Pope's satirical poem The Dunciad.Cibber's poetical work was derided in his time and has been remembered only for being poor. His importance in British theatre history rests on his being one of the first in a long line of actor-managers, on the interest of two of his comedies as documents of evolving early 18th-century taste and ideology, and on the value of his autobiography as a historical source. Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

The Rich Zeoli Show- Full Episode (02/16/2024): 3:05pm- Breaking News: New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron found that the former president Donald Trump inflated the value of assets controlled by the Trump Organization in past financial statements. With no jury, Judge Engoron unilaterally chose to fine Trump $354 million and barred him from conducting business in New York for three years. Notably, in 2018, while campaigning to become New York Attorney General, Letitia James vowed to “sue” Trump and routinely spoke of how she would like to see him imprisoned—providing evidence to the defense's legal argument that this civil suit is entirely political. Trump's legal team is expected to appeal the decision. 3:30pm- In an editorial written for National Review last November, former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew C. McCarthy wrote of Donald Trump's civil fraud case: “Banks are in the loan business to make money. They are heavily regulated and have shareholders to answer to. If a bunch of them had been collectively bilked out of $168 million, don't you imagine there would have been a lawsuit or ten? It's an amazing thing to watch: Donald Trump, front-runner in the Republican presidential nomination race, is on trial for supposedly inventing wealth that he didn't have; and in order to nail him, elected Democrats [Letitia] James and Arthur Engoron are inventing losses that no one ever suffered.” You can read the full article here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/elected-dem-ag-and-judge-cook-up-a-fraud-theory-in-trumps-new-york-trial/ 4:05pm- In his 92-page decision against former President Donald Trump, New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron writes: “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.' Defendants apparently are of a different mind. After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (‘inadvertent,' of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' posture that the evidence belies.” 4:30pm- Dr. Victoria Coates— Former Deputy National Security Advisor & the Vice President of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to weigh-in on government, including intelligence agencies, being weaponized to target Donald Trump. Dr. Coates notes that for the left: “everything is acceptable if it means you can somehow thwart Trump.” According to Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service, Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny died on Friday in an arctic penal colony. He was serving a 19-year prison sentence for “extremism.” Dr. Coates is the author of “David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art.” You can find her book here: https://www.amazon.com/Davids-Sling-History-Democracy-Works/dp/1594037213 5:05pm- Responding to New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron's civil fraud trial decision, former President Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social: “A Crooked New York State Judge, working with a totally Corrupt Attorney General who ran on the basis of “I will get Trump,” before knowing anything about me or my company, has just fined me $355 Million based on nothing other than having built a GREAT COMPANY. ELECTION INTERFERENCE. WITCH HUNT.” 5:10pm- In an editorial written for National Review last November, former Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Andrew C. McCarthy wrote of Donald Trump's civil fraud case: “Banks are in the loan business to make money. They are heavily regulated and have shareholders to answer to. If a bunch of them had been collectively bilked out of $168 million, don't you imagine there would have been a lawsuit or ten? It's an amazing thing to watch: Donald Trump, front-runner in the Republican presidential nomination race, is on trial for supposedly inventing wealth that he didn't have; and in order to nail him, elected Democrats [Letitia] James and Arthur Engoron are inventing losses that no one ever suffered.” You can read the full article here: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/11/elected-dem-ag-and-judge-cook-up-a-fraud-theory-in-trumps-new-york-trial/ 5:25pm- While appearing on Fox News with Sean Hannity, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz reacted to testimony in Thursday's hearing to determine whether Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified from the Georgia election interference case she brought against former President Donald Trump. Dershowitz explained that it is possible that Willis committed perjury. Meanwhile, during a CNN panel, lawyer Jeffrey Toobin said “so what” if Willis and lead prosecutor of the case Nathan Wade had a relationship. 5:40pm- Zack Smith—Legal Fellow and Manager of the Supreme Court and Appellate Advocacy Program in the Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to discuss New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron's decision to fine former President Donald Trump $354 million and barring him from conducting business in New York for three years for inflating the value of assets controlled by the Trump Organization in past financial statements. 6:05pm- New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron found that the former president Donald Trump inflated the value of assets controlled by the Trump Organization in past financial statements. With no jury, Judge Engoron unilaterally chose to fine Trump $354 million and barred him from conducting business in New York for three years. Notably, in 2018, while campaigning to become New York Attorney General, Letitia James vowed to “sue” Trump and routinely spoke of how she would like to see him imprisoned—providing evidence to the defense's legal argument that this civil suit is entirely political. Trump's legal team is expected to appeal the decision. Speaking from Palm Beach, Florida, Trump told the press that “the judge is just a corrupt person.” 6:30pm- Thomas Grove and Matthew Luxmoore of The Wall Street Journal write: “Alexei Navalny, a fierce anticorruption campaigner who galvanized Russia's political opposition, died in prison, according to Russian authorities, bringing to an end a life dedicated to fighting the country's descent into authoritarianism under President Vladimir Putin. The cause of his death was still being established, prison authorities said. He collapsed after a walk at his prison colony on Friday after which, they said, he lost consciousness and couldn't be revived. Navalny, who was 47 and had been in jail since 2021, was serving three prison sentences amounting to more than 30 years on charges he and his supporters said were fabricated. He was detained after returning from Germany, where he was recovering from what German doctors said was poisoning with a Soviet-era nerve agent, Novichok. Navalny blamed his poisoning on the Kremlin, which denied involvement in any attempt to harm him.” You can read the full article here: https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/alexei-navalny-dead-prison-putin-critic-d58db496?mod=hp_lead_pos1 6:40pm- The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board writes: “President Biden is trying to strike a contrast with Donald Trump by promising to stick by America's European allies. Perhaps he hasn't heard Vladimir Putin's media organs crowing that his Administration has double-crossed Europe by halting permits for new liquefied natural gas (LNG) export projects. ‘Now it is not Russia, but the United States that wants to bring the Germans to their knees,' gloated the Russian newspaper Pravda after the Energy Department imposed a moratorium on permits for new LNG export projects last month. Pravda argued that Germany will eventually have to return to buying Russian gas because it will have no other choice, and it may be right.” You can read the full editorial here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-lng-exports-ban-russian-media-vladimir-putin-9d31e3a0?mod=opinion_lead_pos4

The Rich Zeoli Show- Hour 2: In his 92-page decision against former President Donald Trump, New York Judge Arthur F. Engoron writes: “The English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744) first declared, ‘To err is human, to forgive is divine.' Defendants apparently are of a different mind. After some four years of investigation and litigation, the only error (‘inadvertent,' of course) that they acknowledge is the tripling of the size of the Trump Tower Penthouse, which cannot be gainsaid. Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological. They are accused only of inflating asset values to make more money. The documents prove this over and over again. This is a venial sin, not a mortal sin. Defendants did not commit murder or arson. They did not rob a bank at gunpoint. Donald Trump is not Bernard Madoff. Yet, defendants are incapable of admitting the error of their ways. Instead, they adopt a ‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil' posture that the evidence belies.” Dr. Victoria Coates— Former Deputy National Security Advisor & the Vice President of the Davis Institute for National Security and Foreign Policy at The Heritage Foundation—joins The Rich Zeoli Show to weigh-in on the power of government being weaponized to target Donald Trump. Dr. Coates notes that for the far-left: “everything is acceptable as long as it's to thwart Trump.” And, according to Russia's Federal Penitentiary Service, Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny died on Friday in an arctic penal colony. He was serving a 19-year prison sentence for extremism. Dr. Coates is the author of “David's Sling: A History of Democracy in Ten Works of Art.” You can find her book here: https://www.amazon.com/Davids-Sling-History-Democracy-Works/dp/1594037213

Although the early part of Robert Browning's creative life was spent in comparative obscurity, he has come to be regarded as one of the most important English poets of the Victorian period. His dramatic monologues and the psycho-historical epic The Ring and the Book (1868-1869), a novel in verse, have established him as a major figure in the history of English poetry. His claim to attention as a children's writer is more modest, resting as it does almost entirely on one poem, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” included almost as an afterthought in Bells and Pomegranites. No. III.—Dramatic Lyrics (1842) and evidently never highly regarded by its creator. Nevertheless, “The Pied Piper” moved quickly into the canon of children's literature, where it has remained ever since, receiving the dubious honor (shared by the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan) of appearing almost as frequently in “adapted” versions as in the author's original. His approach to dramatic monologue influenced countless poets for almost a century. Browning was born on May 7, 1812 in Camberwell, a middle-class suburb of London. He was the only son of Robert Browning, a clerk in the Bank of England, and a devoutly religious German-Scotch mother, Sarah Anna Wiedemann Browning. He had a sister, Sarianna, who like her parents was devoted to Browning. While Mrs. Browning's piety and love of music are frequently cited as important influences on the poet's development, his father's scholarly interests and unusual educational practices may have been equally significant. The son of a wealthy banker, Robert Browning the elder had been sent in his youth to make his fortune in the West Indies, but he found the slave economy there so distasteful that he returned, hoping for a career in art and scholarship. A quarrel with his father and the financial necessity it entailed led the elder Browning to relinquish his dreams so as to support himself and his family through his bank clerkship.Browning's father amassed a personal library of some 6,000 volumes, many of them collections of arcane lore and historical anecdotes that the poet plundered for poetic material, including the source of “The Pied Piper.” The younger Browning recalled his father's unorthodox methods of education in his late poem “Development,” published in Asolando: Fancies and Facts (1889). Browning remembers at the age of five asking what his father was reading. To explain the siege of Troy, the elder Browning created a game for the child in which the family pets were assigned roles and furniture was recruited to serve for the besieged city. Later, when the child had incorporated the game into his play with his friends, his father introduced him to Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad. Browning's appetite for the story having been whetted, he was induced to learn Greek so as to read the original. Much of Browning's education was conducted at home by his father, which accounts for the wide range of unusual information the mature poet brought to his work. His family background was also important for financial reasons; the father whose own artistic and scholarly dreams had been destroyed by financial necessity was more than willing to support his beloved son's efforts. Browning decided as a child that he wanted to be a poet, and he never seriously attempted any other profession. Both his day-to-day needs and the financial cost of publishing his early poetic efforts were willingly supplied by his parents.At the time of his death in 1889, he was one of the most popular poets in England.-bio via Poetry Foundation Get full access to The Daily Poem Podcast at dailypoempod.substack.com/subscribe

Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day for December 30, 2023 is: arduous • AHR-juh-wus • adjective Arduous is an adjective used to describe something that is very difficult or strenuous. // The gorgeous waterfall at the top of the mountain was worth the arduous hike. See the entry > Examples: “And with [hockey player, Patrice] Bergeron now enjoying the retired life after 19 seasons spent with the Bruins, the six-time Selke Trophy winner acknowledged that [Zdeno] Chara has already tried to recruit him for some arduous training.” — Conor Ryan, Boston.com, 21 Nov. 2023 Did you know? Arduous isn't the type of word one expects to hear in a folk song—it's a bit too formal—but strenuous work and difficult journeys are the stuff of many a classic tune. Take “The Wayfaring Stranger,” for an example, a somber song about life's travails performed by everyone from singer and activist Paul Robeson to country star Emmylou Harris: “I know dark clouds will gather o'er me / I know my pathway's rough and steep.” Such a lyric gets at the dual literal/figurative nature of arduous, which comes from the Latin adjective arduus, meaning “high,” “steep,” or “difficult.” For quite a while after appearing in English in the mid-1500s, arduous hewed closely to the figurative “strenuous” or “difficult” sense until poet Alexander Pope invoked steepness when he wrote of “those arduous paths they trod” in his 1711 work “An Essay on Criticism.” To pen such a work at the age of 23, and in heroic couplets no less, must have been an arduous challenge indeed, but like the wayfaring stranger seeking a brighter land, Pope had his eyes on the prize.