Tea at Trianon: The Bad Poetry of Modern Hymnody

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

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

The Bad Poetry of Modern Hymnody

Classic Esolen. From Crisis:

In an earlier column, I asked why we could not sing hymns from the Christian treasury, which is nearly two thousand years old, and which features composers with names like Bach and Handel and poets from Prudentius to Thomas Aquinas to Isaac Watts, the Wesleys, and John Henry Newman, rather than silly, sloppy, banally sentimental, and often ungrammatical lyrics set to off-off-Broadway show tunes. I sensed from the comments that people don’t consider metrical poetry to be an art, with standards of excellence or at least of good workmanship, nor do they consider that the lyrics of hymns are supposed to be poems and should be judged as such.

I think I know what explains this disregard of the poetic art. Poetry has simply vanished from what remains of popular culture. It’s not an important part of the lives of ordinary people. I have a copy of the poems of Bliss Carman, from the 1930s, given as a birthday gift from one woman to another and signed inside the cover. Carman was popular, in the true sense of the word, as were Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg. When Henry Longfellow was an old man, several boys showed up at his door in Cambridge because they loved his poems. They had never met him, but they knew it was his birthday, and they came to thank him and congratulate him. Longfellow welcomed them and they enjoyed the afternoon together. That was Longfellow’s seventy-fifth birthday, his last in the world. (Read more.)