Friday Links
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Gustave Doré Inferno plate 9
January 17, 2025
New Verse Review and Ekstasis
Thomist Poets with Paige Parker
An Iconoclastic Inferno: James Matthew Wilson review Jason Baxter’s Inferno
Raymond N. MacKenzie: I’m ready for you!
Daniel Pitt: Piety, Love, and the Permanent Things
A Shroud for Our Skeptical Times
Objects of Fascination by Peter Hitchens
The Pattern by The Reflection Box
New Verse Review and Ekstasis
For the cold, and possibly snowy weekend, upon us, here’s an absolute feast of new writing from New Verse Review and Ekstasis. Both are chock-full of good work, including poetry from Dappled Things assistant executive editor Isabella Hsu, Christian Wiman, Maya Venters, A. M. Juster, Mary Grace Mangano, J. C. Scharl, Alfred Nicol, Daniel Patrick Sheehan, Seth Wieck, Ned Balbo, and Zara Raab, and essays from Elijah Perseus Blumov and Paul Pastor. There’s much, much more…enjoy!
Thomist Poets Reading Series with Paige Parker
The next reader in the Thomist Poets Reading Series is the lovely Paige Parker. Please join us Sunday at 7pm EST (online) for a night of beautiful verse. Here’s the link for the Google Meet.
An Iconoclastic Inferno: James Matthew Wilson review Jason Baxter’s Inferno
This kind of verbal chopping and interpolation happens again and again. Sometimes, Baxter is bringing out the precise qualities of Dante’s rhetoric. More often, he is making the poem rougher, more halting, than it is in Dante’s original. Late in the Inferno, Dante writes, “If I had rhymes sufficiently hoarse and harsh / to be a fitting match for this sick hole . . .” Baxter has not given him the rhymes, but he has certainly given him the rhetoric in spades. Probably the closest analogy to Baxter’s poetic practice, curiously, is the early poetry of Ezra Pound, where Pound personifies Dante’s characters and contemporaries in dramatic monologues similarly harsh and elliptical, as the dramatized voices break apart under the pressure of heartache.
Raymond N. MacKenzie: I’m ready for you!
MacKenzie considers Éric Hazan’s Balzac’s Paris: The City as Human Comedy and Balzac’s The Lily in the Valley:
The nature of Balzac’s legacy can be debated, but part of his achievement was to shift the novel in the direction of cultural documentation and analysis. The earliest novel readers, a century before, already expected to learn something from the experience, but the Comédie had different, and greater, ambitions from the moral lessons taught by Richardson, or even Laclos. In 1858, in one of the earliest extended studies of Balzac, who died in 1850, Hippolyte Taine argued that he had provided an invaluable guide to his era, creating characters who embody its social and economic forces.
Daniel Pitt on Roger Scruton: Piety, Love, and the Permanent Things
Piety, gratitude, and love are all important aspects of Scruton’s thought. Roger once said to me that it was because of John Casey, a literary historian at the University of Cambridge and a mentor to Roger, that he had taken unchosen and unsought obligations—piety—seriously in both morality and political philosophy. Casey persuaded Scruton of the importance of unchosen obligations within a moral and full life. Moreover, Casey impressed upon Scruton the fundamentality of piety to conservative thought.
A Shroud for Our Skeptical Times
Reports about recent scientific findings that appear to support the authenticity of the Shroud of Turin garnered widespread coverage in secular media outlets last month.
But none of those media accounts delved into this central question: Assuming the image visible on the fabric of the shroud really is that of the Crucified Christ — supernaturally imprinted there by Jesus himself, as he lay in the tomb between his crucifixion on Good Friday and his resurrection on the first Easter Sunday — why did the Son of God choose to leave behind this scientifically verifiable evidence of his death on the cross?
Objects of Fascination by Peter Hitchens
Hitchens writes for The Lamp “On the unexplainable natural occurrances” and the delight and shock they can bring:
I had been walking out in some remote woods, listening to the soft thunder of the gale in the bare trees, one of the loveliest sounds on Earth. It had been an especially clean, clear day of pure, icy air, very high skies and distant views. By the time I had made my way back into the brickish inhabited fringes of the town, my mind had been turning to dull thoughts of groceries, news bulletins, timetables, and deadlines. It was because I was quite unready for the cloud of starlings that it affected me so strongly.
The Pattern by The Reflection Box
Just a gorgeous song from Donegal band, The Reflection Box.
