Very enjoyable poem, Dale!

Thanks! I would never have found it...

--Sawfish

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"The food at the new restaurant is awful, but at least the portions are large."
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Knygatin Wrote:

> But on the other hand, it may be viewed as an
> anti-European tract, doesn't it?


Yes -- but the Europe to which the poem's sentiment is opposed is not the Europe of the Great West, that is, of Homer, Herodotus, and Virgil, Plato and Boethius, Bede and Byzantium, Florence and Wittenberg, Dante and Pascal, Malory and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dostoevsky; but the successor-Europe that includes the US and Canada and (as T. S. Eliot put it in his essay on Baudelaire) is "a world of electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and dress reform," this world of Marx and Henry Ford and Hitler and Mao and Ibram Kendi, etc.


Note correction to text of poem:

Untamed is Europe, unnamed

If you are a man of the Great West, be sure to support homeschooling, which is almost the last refuge thereof.

But my comment belongs better in the thread for discussion of miscellaneous topics. I'm going to copy it and the Lewis poem, and post them there. Please comment there.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 22 Jun 21 | 01:04PM by Dale Nelson.

Dale Nelson Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Knygatin Wrote:
>
> > But on the other hand, it may be viewed as an
> > anti-European tract, doesn't it?
>
>
> Yes -- but the Europe to which the poem's
> sentiment is opposed is not the Europe of the
> Great West, that is, of Homer, Herodotus, and
> Virgil, Plato and Boethius, Bede and Byzantium,
> Florence and Wittenberg, Dante and Pascal, Malory
> and Shakespeare and Jane Austen and Dostoevsky;
> but the successor-Europe (as T. S. Eliot put it in
> his essay on Baudelaire) that is "a world of
> electoral reform, plebiscites, sex reform and
> dress reform," of Marx and Henry Ford and Hitler,
> etc.
>
>

"17. Horribly ridged are their foreheads. Weapons of stone,

18. Unhandy and blunt, they brandish in their clumsy grips."


I thought Lewis meant pre-civilized Europe. The land of Neanderthals. Which also may be a bit unfair, since they were comparably evolved for the time. And hardy. We still have some of their genes.

Knygatin, let's discuss the poem at the miscellaneous thread -- but, in reply to your comment, I suppose one could say that the situation is that of an ante-Europe, Europe before it was Europe but after the destruction of Atlantis. The Atlantean is going to bring the arts of civilization to those squalling beast-men, and the great Europe will eventually arise therefrom; but now (see the beginning of the poem), Lewis and other men of the Great West can see that Europe as it has been is coming to its end. Like the Atlantean they must resign themselves to this great loss.

Now this is a poem, not an essay or a book and I don't think one should take it that Lewis is expressing a conviction about what must happen -- but on the other hand he is quite serious about the likelihood of a terrible loss of civilization. It's not just the totalitarian slave-states that threaten civilization but the mind-forged manacles of Marxism and its various kin, and the Fordean idea that "history is bunk" -- what matters is keeping people occupied with consumer goods cheaply enough produced that they can keep buying them, etc. But if you want to comment on what I just wrote, please copy what you want to comment on and carry it over to the Super Thread of Art etc -- thank you! Let's let the present thread return to CAS and his use of alcohol etc.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 22 Jun 21 | 01:20PM by Dale Nelson.