Senator Rand Paul’s often may misapply poetry, but the poems he chooses tell us a lot about Rand Paul.
Between the motion and the act of my tennis game falls the shadow. Translation: too much thinking.
Also posted in Robinson (Edward Arlington), Shakespeare (William) | Tagged "Hollow Men", "Minniver Cheevy", E. A. Robinson, Hamlet, Marshall McLuhan, Sports, T. S. Eliot, tennis, William Gladwell, William Shakespeare |
Langston Hughes’ “Mother to Son” opened up a profound conversation with our building’s housekeeping staff.
Obama’s youthful love letters see him moving seamlessly between great ideas with sexual desire.
Newt Gingrich reminds me of “the young man carbuncular” in “The Wasteland,” “one of the low on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
Should we dismiss all the rhetoric coming from the Republican presidential candidates as the gryphon in “Alice in Wonderland” dismisses the “off with their heads” commands of the Queen of Hearts?
Having just turned 60, I’ve been thinking of Teiresias. Wise though the blind seer may be, his advice doesn’t help others that much. Aging, in other words, appears to require humility.
Also posted in Euripides, Johnson (Samuel), Sophocles, Yeats (William Butler) | Tagged Aging, Bacchae, Carl Jung, Euripides, Homer, Odyssey, Oedipus, Sophocles, T. S. Eliot, Wasteland |
Poetry, with its eye on what really matters, can help us taste food again. Mary Oliver’s “Plum Trees” reminds us to eat with full awareness.
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.” Eliot’s well-known conclusion to “The Hollow Men” (read the poem here) came to mind after watching the Butler Bulldogs lose to the Connecticut Huskies 53-41.The game was so bad that it takes a masterpiece of modernist despair to do it justice.
Spiritual Sunday In a follow-up to yesterday’s post on football quarterback Michael Vick, I want to elaborate further on Coleridge’s argument for penance. Penance is not only the right thing to do. It also can make you feel very, very good. Coleridge gives us images in Rime of the Ancient Mariner that drive this point [...]
Sports Saturday Mistah Steinbrenner—he dead. So I imagine T. S. Eliot announcing the death of the legendary Yankee owner this past week. That’s because, if one goes by Eliot’s famous 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” one could not say that “the Boss” was “Shape without form, shade without colour,/ Paralysed force, gesture without motion.” In fact, an [...]
