The greatest Irish poet of the past centuries, William Butler Yeats was a complex character, even for Ireland. He was born into the Protestant Aristocratic culture of southern Ireland who are known as the Anglo-Irish. He wrote some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century in English, and was a conservative Irish Nationalist, and a sometime Irish politician. He's quite frankly tied with Gerard Manley Hopkins for my favorite English speaking poets, ever. His prose style has influenced me greatly both in my own writing and my imagination. Like most Anglo-Irish he didn't care for Catholicism that much, which was the majority religion of the rank and file of Irish men and women. Yet he admired and loved the legends and folklore of the Irish people some of which predated Christianity but was never officially condemned by the Church in Ireland to my knowledge, and if you ask a Catholic Irish peasant, I'm sure they would have seen their p...
The name of this blog is High Culture Quest because I want to share my love of classical literature both fiction, and non. I want to show that literature is essential to all cultures particularly in the western/European tradition, which is where all ill be drawing my focus on. I will deal with everything from religious works to Historical Fiction. I also will be arguing how Science Fiction and Fantasy Novels deserved to be considered works of high art and are very valuable to our culture. I hope to accomplish this as well as continue to develop my writing style as well as to help people understand literature in a concrete way. I also just want to s...
Modernism has been presented in all forms of art in (don't be shocked!) the modern world. When it was fashionable it made writing boring dull and un-lyrical. There are some exceptions and there are modernists I enjoy, most notably TS Eliot. My main quarrel with most Modernism in writing and art in general, is that it has no ascetical beauty to it. Take a writer like Virginia Woolf, in contrast to my favorite poet other than, Yeats, Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose prose was all about his own self expression of the beauty of the presence of God, Virginia Woolf was iconoclastic against lyrical beauty, from the stories I have read from her. She's been called a "stream of consciousness writer" and to be fair she does a pretty good job at details, but as I said the ascetic beauty is rather lacking. In her "A Haunted House." she seems to be suggesting the most utterly absurd idea that ghost stories should prohibit a real belief in the supernatural in contrast...
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