Posted on 03/22/2005 12:16:07 PM PST by RightReason
American political conservatives enjoy an uneasy relationship with high culture.
There are, of course, those who define their conservatism precisely in terms of high culture - of the preservation and transmission from past to future generations of "the best that has been thought and written."
But economic and religious conservatives might wonder what's in it for them. For it is far from obvious that the canonical works of literature, music and visual art are much help, on the whole, when it comes to defending the free market or the altar and hearth. It would be one thing if the canon consisted primarily in the holy scriptures of democratic capitalism and Christianity. But these days it is liable to incorporate Marx alongside Adam Smith and Nietzsche alongside the Bible.
Moreover, the present-day heirs of Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot who man the high cultural battlements, notably in the pages of The New Criterion, seem to have welcomed the whole of modernism into the keep. But, for better or worse, the average American political conservative has probably never even quite swallowed The Wasteland or Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. So is he at all likely to get much more out of the works of, say, Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning than he does out of Piss Christ or the chocolate-covered Karen Finley? Perhaps he may be forgiven for wondering whether he has much at stake in the struggle to defend traditions that culminate in the likes of abstract expressionism and serialism against the assaults of the postmodernist wreckers. Better, perhaps, to abolish the National Endowments altogether, defund college humanities divisions that seem to do nothing useful anyway, and head down to the NASCAR track, put on a Garth Brooks album, or take in a movie.
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What's worthile will always endure. And Modernism was a conservative movement in its day albeit a paeloconservative one from our vantage point. T.S. Eliot's outlook wasn't that different from Pat Buchanan's
The "canon" really is: The Scriptures, Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Greek Dramatists, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, selected Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Cervantes, Goethe, Racine, Descartes, The Federalist and that's about it.
I may have missed one or two, but basically all that is good and great in the West can be reconstructed from these texts.
Well you're bascially saying the Canon stopped when Goethe died. How about Dickens, Melville and so forth? Not to mention Joyce and Proust. There were lots of great artists in the last 200 years.
Sorry about the double post!
But tastes differ. I'm sure there are people who think Toni Morrison is greater than Shakespeare. Sigh.
It would have been ridiculous to include Milton in the "canon" in 1725 - the jury was still very much out at that point.
It is equally ridiculous to place Joyce or Proust automatically in that category today, and they are authors I personally enjoy a great deal.
If Leopold Bloom tears at future generations' heartstrings as Cordelia does to ours, then it will be resolved.
I would hope no one except the unlettered think that. :-) I should probably read more of her but what I've read strikes me as watered down Faulkner.
Of course, the standard seems to be that Morrison is easier to read and "hipper" than Shakespeare.
Craftsmanship and philosophical clarity are largely external to personal taste, but these are no longer considered valid criteria.
Well it's always in progress. John Donne, a contemporary of Shakespeare, was not much thought of until T.S. Eliot brough him back. Eliot thought he was superior to the Bard.
High culture, in general, and high western culture, in particular, must be defended. The problem with a lot of this is that who defines what culture/art is? The devaluing definition of art is everywhere. I kid you not, but some people call rap music art. I believe through the works of antiquity that the bar has been raised so high that this modern generation of artist can not attain such a lofty pirch, so they chase each other around the altar of mediocrity and call each other's art "enlightenment". I guess to an extent art, whether literature, paintings, music, or speech, has reached the point of diminishing returns.
Eliot was a skilled minor poet who delighted in extremely recondite and even bizarre imagery and wordplay.
Viewing their work side by side, it makes sense that Eliot arrived at a high estimation of Donne - and I would agree that Donne was a finer sonneteer than Shakespeare.
Of course, Eliot never blankly stated such a strong opinion as you describe.
Eliot also said that Marlowe might have surpassed Shakespeare had he lived.
Eliot also said that "Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third." A statement that would seem to leave Donne out of the picture.
Of course, Eliot also had an extremely high opinion of the interesting, entertaining but decidedly non-"great" Ezra Pound.
Nothing short of a total collapse of the West will edit Shakespeare out of his position.
This is true.
Isaac Asimov believed that Shakespeare actually retarded the developement of English in the sense that although it had rapdily been developing up until then, people did not want the language to change to such an extent that Shakespeare's English would become foreign to us.
Asimov was wrong. Shakespeare did not develop the cultural power and influence he currently has until the 1800s.
His reputation was a matter of strong debate in the 1750s and until the 1830s, his plays were rarely performed unedited. No one would think of changing Shakespeare's language to modern English and then labelling it as Shakespeare's work today, but this routinely happened in England in the late 1700s.
The KJV had far more of a formative influence on English than Shakespeare and yet even it was reedited and modernized in the 1700s.
Well, if he's apart from the big three, who are presumably major, he is minor.
I don't think one can truly be a major poet if one has never written a major work. A King Lear, an Othello, an Aeneid, an Odyssey, a Canterbury Tales, a Paradise Lost.
Eliot downgraded Milton and the Romantics...who he thought had made poetry florid and dissociative,
And Milton has weathered this criticism admirably - although the reputation of Keats and Shelley have dimmed and Blake's has grown.
I would agree with Eliot regarding the Romantics, in fact.
And again, he found in the metaphysicians a kindred spirit and aesthetic.
He seemed to go through all sorts of mental guymnastics to figure out a way to claim Shakespeare wasn't all that (calling Hamlet an artistc failure) but could never quite find a way.
Eliot enjoyed being a contrarian in many ways and his contrariness to leftist pieties is now injuring his reputation, sadly.
Ezra Pound was more important then good.
Before Pound became obsessed with Henry George's single tax cult, he had the makings of a really lasting poet - he knew the tradition inside and out, he was conversant with the entire history of European verse, he was well aware of the shortcomings and pitfalls of recent poetical heroes like Whitman and Housman, he was a bold experimenter - but it all came to naught.
His fixation on macroeconomics sucked all the joy and vitality out of his verse.
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