Venturing into the heated atmosphere of Supreme Court confirmation politics yesterday is a nice lead-in to my topic for today, which is the temptation to become so disgusted with human behavior that we throw up our hands and walk away. Or, since walking away is not really an option, the fantasy of doing so. Jonathan […]
Monthly Archives: May 2009
Swift’s Attack on Cynicism
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged cynicism, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, politics Comments closed
Sotomayor and Latina “Bias”
I’m going to take a break from one political topic—the disillusion that some who voted for Barack Obama are experiencing or will experience (and the ability of Gulliver’s Travels to help idealists of all stripes to understand and work through disillusion)—to take on another. There is a (predictable) furor over President Obama’s choice of Sonia […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Crime and Punishment, fictional identification, Justice, Lolita, Paule Marshall, politics, Sonia Sotomayer Comments closed
Silencing Inner Doubts through Fanaticism
Continuing the discussion on how Gulliver’s Travels can help us handle the challenges of political disillusion, I turn to Book II, where Gulliver finds himself stranded in the land of the giant Brobdingnags. In Book I, as I noted in the last entry, Gulliver can remain aloof from human perversity—and when, in the end, it […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Fanaticism, Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift, politics Comments closed
Using Gullibility as a Shield vs. Disillusion
In Book I of Gulliver’s Travels, Gulliver lives in a world where he can be “above it all.” He can afford to be open-minded and generous because most issues don’t really affect him. Although he is, as his name suggests, gullible, it is gullibility that he can get away with. I stress this point because […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Gulliver's Travels, Idealism, Jonathan Swift, Naivete Comments closed
Swift, Obama, and Idealism
Like many Americans, I was excited, inspired, and rendered hopeful by the election of Barack Obama as president last November. I felt that, at long last, we could accomplish great things in this country. I have also been thinking how I will respond when my high hopes run up against reality. At least I’m old […]
Death and Language’s Limitations
In spending the last two weeks discussing how poetry can come to our aid in a season of death, I have been exploring how poetry responds to its greatest test. Death and dying can trigger our deepest fears, generate panic, denial and anger, prompt us to question everything we believe in, and send on frantic […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged A. H. Tennyson, cancer, death of a child, Gail Godwin, In Memoriam, The Good Husband Comments closed
A Death Poem Must Acknowledge the Pain
For today’s entry on poems that can come to our aid when we are confronting death, I will be looking at two. In both poems, the speaker has lost a loved one. One of them, which I have known and loved since high school and whose sentiments I agree with, now angers me. The other, […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged death of a child, Funeral Blues, Highland Mary, Robert Burns, Stop All the Clock, W. H. Auden Comments closed
After Apple-Picking, Then What?
So much of the poetry that comforts us in time of death is infused with images of nature, poems like (in my case) Mary Oliver’s “Lost Children,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Adonais, and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Perhaps the reason is that, with death, our natural side asserts its primacy in a way that cannot […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged After Apple-Picking, death of a parent, Hamlet, John Donne, Robert Frost, Sonnet X Comments closed
Can Pastoral Elegies Ease the Pain?
In a grad school class I once heard Peter Lehmann, a friend of Virginia and Leonard Woolf, say that, during the London blitzkrieg of 1940-41, all the London bookshops sold out their poetry. This means, I think, that in times of tragedy we turn to poetry for solace. It’s like the way that people who […]
Posted in Uncategorized Tagged Adonais, death of a child, John Milton, Lycidas, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Samuel Johnson Comments closed
