Your Email:

Subject:

Message:
Entry: Taki's List Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/takis_list#264 Post contents: Taki - I invite you to read my 'semi-classically formed' poem on America, nation, destiny, 9/11 - "Storyteller at Times Square" posted at http://sober-passion.blogspot.com/ I would welcome a reaction from you - at last, a reader who is acquainted with the High Tradition of English (and other) poetry and who is unabashedly loyal to it. "Dante, the all time numero uno, Homer, Pushkin, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Shelley, that’s what I call poetry. Instead of attacking Iraq, Bush should have started a war against modernism. Shoot all poets who don’t write in iambic pentameter." You omitted Wordsworth, Milton and Shakespeare, but it's nice you included the other Romantics. Most conservatives only sneer at them. I read Dante when I was a student at the British Institute in Florence, Italy. A wonderful experience. I studied a little Greek - not enough to read Homer - but only can recite the first five lines of the Iliad. Pushkin is a marvel even in English. There is much more to this tradition of poetry in terms of the spiritual future (?) of Western society. These great English poets, esp. from the Romantic period, strongly defended the visionary faculty and objected strongly to the reductionistic model of thinking.They really saw what was happening. I think that the suffocating materialism of Western thinking is in large part the cause for the decadence of Western culture and for the chaos and dishonor that besets us. An intense revival of interest in the Romantics could stimulate a respiritualization and renewal of thinking. Go to it, Taki. Read my poem and tell me what you think - caryl.johnston@verizon.net. Sent at: 2008 07 06