The Spirit of Understanding

English Literature in an Age of Confusion

The winning contestants on University Challenge could not identify lines from one of the best-known English poems, Keats Ode to Autumn, and seemed unconcerned about their ignorance. This book provides an engaging retrospect for readers who have forgotten, or who have never had much chance to study, their own literature and history. In presenting a kind of cross-section of this abundant inheritance, it supplies ample selective quotes, and suggests an antidote to the strange sickness of modernity, which seems to have forgotten that memory is the mother of the muses. Literature, one of the bulwarks of defence against unwarranted authority, has been attacked, distorted, and eliminated from curricula because its traditional teachings, handed on for generations, oppose a determined modernist agenda. The age demands conformity ; the poets are independent. The traditional writings banished from shelves and the popular imagination educate the soul, inculcating such qualities as fortitude, one of the forgotten virtues. Criticism of and from the media, the self-appointed commentators who make up the narratives of the day, has been undertaken by analysts as diverse as Noam Chomsky and William Buckley. Some of their works are listed in the bibliography. Myths and heroic tales that inform western literature and adjust our perspective come principally from the Greeks, especially from Homer, and from Vergil, who told the great tale of Troy that fulfilled the dreams of Rome. Homer delighted in the natural world, in beautifully made arms, cups, tapestries, all bathed in a pitiless light. The old Anglo Saxon poets who also wrote in the epic tradition felt particularly the mightiness of evil, the transience of life, and the power of the word to shape the world, and to hold themselves in remembrance. The Middle Ages achieved the greatest dream of all, uniting the mythical with the practical, painting great panoramas of life, meditating upon the unseen, and the Elizabethan age rediscovered heroism and the power of personality. After the free discourse and argument of the seventeenth century, with its resulting wars and fragmentation, a more cohesive nation emerged, one that came to believe in reason and mans own mind ; while the Romantic poets who followed show, sometimes disastrously, the wildness of individualism, of diversity apart from social integration and a common faith. The long Victorian afternoon and golden evening of the nineteenth century saw an expansion of these tendencies and a renewing of faith, but there has been no significant new development from the revolution and romanticism of a century earlier. Rather the movement has played itself out with post modernism.