Tea at Trianon: Yale Students Petition to ‘Abolish’ Major English Poets

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, June 7, 2018

Yale Students Petition to ‘Abolish’ Major English Poets

From Intellectual Takeout:

First, a look at who these major English poets are. Shakespeare. Chaucer. Milton. And then there are men such Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Alexander Pope, William Wordsworth, and T.S. Eliot. Not bad company, eh? Is it too much to ask English literature majors to take a couple classes to study the men who shaped the language and gave it great beauty? Apparently so. The petition says students in these classes “are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room.” From where does this alienation spring? Is it from the works of the great poets? Or is it the fact that they are white, male, and heterosexual? (Read more.)