Tag Archives: Arab Spring

The Terrible Beauty of Political Fanatics

By Robin Bates | Published: March 29, 2016

While many are celebrating the centenary of Ireland’s Easter uprising, Yeats’s famous poem on the rebellion offers us cautions about how to respond to such acts of rebellion today.

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Hope and Disillusion in Egypt

By Robin Bates | Published: August 16, 2013

Wordsworth’s “Prelude” captures both the hopes and disillusion that many have felt about the Egyptian revolution.

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Syria’s Massacre of the Innocents

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2012

Updating Herod’s slaughter of the innocents, Scott Bates imagines a soldier who takes a principled stand and refuses to participate.

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The Perfection and Poetry of Tyrants

By Robin Bates | Published: November 16, 2011

W. H. Auden’s chilling “Epitaph on a Tyrant” matter-of-factly shows the deadly but seductive simplicity that characterizes dictators like Qaddafi and Assad.

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Shelley and Non-Violent Resistance

By Robin Bates | Published: July 21, 2011

Blogger Austin Allen credits Shelley’s poem “Masque” with setting in motion the idea of non-violent resistance that we are currently seeing employed throughout the Arab world.

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Refugees Dropped in a Fantastic Terrain

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2011

As I watch the brutal repression currently underway in Syria, I am reminded of Syrian-American poet Mohja Kahf’s poem about her family fleeing to America from Assad’s father in 1971.

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