Monthly Archives: January 2019

Whitman Would Embrace Trump’s Victims

By Robin Bates | Published: January 10, 2019

Thursday I wrote yesterday’s Walt Whitman post before hearing Donald Trump’s Oval Office address, which is why I find myself returning to the poet again so soon. Like the Statue of Liberty mentioned by Sen. Chuck Schumer in his response to Trump, Whitman’s Song of Myself serves as an antidote to the president’s racism and xenophobia. Trump, as […]

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Whitman Humanizes the Judicial Process

By Robin Bates | Published: January 9, 2019

Wednesday In a fascinating project described by New Yorker author Jia Tolentino a while back, a young filmmaker used Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself to understand Alabama culture. Touring the state, Jennifer Crandall had different people recite lines from the poem, including a drug court judge in an open session. I highly recommend watching the […]

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Through Lit, We Learn Compassion

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2019

Tuesday My brother Sam, an enthusiastic Unitarian Universalist, gave me Karen Armstrong’s Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life for Christmas, and I was pleased that the author sees literature playing a major role. In today’s post I share how she draws on the ancient Greeks. Armstrong writes, “All faiths insist that compassion is the test […]

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Trump’s Wall, Symbolic or Literal?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2019

Monday Literature majors will find their training useful in understanding why Donald Trump has chosen to shut down the government. It has to do with the difference between the symbolic and the literal. A literal wall makes very little sense, with the $5.5 billion dollars that Trump is demanding from American taxpayers (not from Mexico) […]

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Epiphany: A Baby’s Cry, a Big Bang

By Robin Bates | Published: January 5, 2019

Spiritual Sunday I love this Bruce Monroe Robison poem that updates the story of the Wise Men, imagining them acquainted with astrophysics and the Big Bang theory. As he sees it, Jesus’s infant cry also created a new universe, “the first whisper in the still tissue of space.” Matthew 2: Magi  We have seen his […]

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No Frigate Like a Book

By Robin Bates | Published: January 4, 2019

Friday To end the week, I share one of Ilya Milstein’s enchanting illustrations, along with the Emily Dickinson poem that it reminds me of. We start off in a library and, next thing we know, we have been transported “lands away.” I haven’t always admired “There is no frigate like a book,” perhaps because I […]

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Lit as a Survival Toolkit

By Robin Bates | Published: January 3, 2019

Thursday Friend and occasional guest blogger Carl Rosin alerted me to a heartfelt Commonweal article by an English professor describing how literature helped her confront and work through childhood abuse. Cassandra Nelson’s difficult history leads to some remarkable insights into trigger warnings, which she opposes. Nelson’s view on trigger warnings is pretty much my own […]

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Which Shakespeare Character Is Trump?

By Robin Bates | Published: January 2, 2019

Wednesday It’s satisfying to see national pundits take a page out of Better Living through Beowulf and turn to the classics to understand Donald Trump. Okay, so NeverTrumper conservative Bret Stephens has probably never read this blog, but we both recognize how literature deepens our understanding of the world, including American politics. I particularly appreciate […]

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Share Hope and Watch It Grow

By Robin Bates | Published: January 1, 2019

New Year’s Day Former colleague Dana Greene alerted me to this luminescent New Year’s poem by Denise Levertov. In it, the poet compares hope to a small crystal and a cluster of irises. When Emily Dickinson describes hope as “the thing with feathers that perches in the soul,” she focuses on the individual. Hope comes […]

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