Listen to the beauty and balance of this line of poetry:
βῆ δ’ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης
He set out, silent, along the shore of the much-thundering sea.
— Iliad, I.34
If one listens to the metre of the Greek, and particularly to where the ictus falls throughout the verse, one can hear the sound of the waves in the background, with a crash, rather appropriately, in the middle of πολυφλοίσβοιο (loud-roaring).
βῆ δ’ ἀκέ | ων παρὰ | θῖνα πο | λυφλοίσ | βοιο θα | λάσσης
It seems unlikely that any author would deny the influence of others on his work. Yet the more the author seeks to identify all his sources, the more he may convey the impression that what is left over, when those sources are accounted for, is indubitably his own. But there is bound to be a moiety that he has not found nor isolated; all writing is filled with what Jonathan Lethem calls “quotations without inverted commas.” Here are a few words from Lethem’s remarkable essay “The Ecstasy of Influence,” which is well worth reading.
Arguably, a selection of the worst prose written cannot but include the inimitable G Ragsdale McClintock, a delightful creation of Mark Twain. Twain writes of McClintock's work The Enemy Conquered; or, Love Triumphant:
The reader must not imagine that he is to find in it wisdom, brilliancy, fertility of invention, ingenuity of construction, excellence of form, purity of style, perfection of imagery, truth to nature, clearness of statement, humanly possible situations, humanly possible people, fluent narrative, connected sequence of events–or philosophy, or logic, or sense. No; the rich, deep, beguiling charm of the book lies in the total and miraculous absence from it of all these qualities–a charm which is completed and perfected by the evident fact that the author, whose naive innocence easily and surely wins our regard, and almost our worship, does not know that they are absent, does not even suspect that they are absent.
Tim Keller spoke recently at the multi-faith Service of Remembrance and Peace for 9/11 Victims' Families held at Ground Zero. His talk, though brief, set forward the Christian hope. He did not preach the gospel, but what he did speak was radiant with godly light.
Bad poetry is a delight to the soul, especially when it is so unashamedly bad that no one could contest its enormity. For example, listen to these words that no doubt brought a smile to the Rev Gilfillan of Dundee, and have been bringing smiles to countless people since…
Until recently, the image at the head of my web page was a detail from Vermeer's View of Delft.
The View of Delft rightly deserves admiration, and none apparently recognised that more than Proust, who not only died with Vermeer's name on his lips, but who named the View as the painting beloved by Bergotte, a character from in À la recherche du temps perdu who best seems to hold Proust's own views on art.
“For my part,” said Coggan, “I’m staunch Church of England.”
“Ay, and faith, so be I.” said Mark Clark.
“I won’t say much for myself; I don’t wish to,” Coggan continued, with that tendency to talk on principles which is characteristic of the barley-corn. “But I’ve never changed a single doctrine: I’ve stuck like a plaster to the old faith I was born in. Yes; there’s this to be said for the Church, a man can belong to the Church and bide in his cheerful old inn, and never trouble or worry his mind about doctrines at all. But to be a meetinger, you must go to chapel in all winds and weathers, and make yerself as frantic as a skit. Not but that chapel members be clever chaps enough in their way. They can lift up beautiful prayers out of their own heads, all about their families and shipwrecks in the newspaper.”
Aristotle is worth reading. The Poetics is no exception even though is fragmentary nature means that there is much that is lost to us. The style, in fact, resembles nothing so much as a speaker’s notes. But there is much to be gained from the man who was known for many years simply as The Philosopher.
Read more on Aristotle on homiletics and Biblical criticism…
I recently had the pleasure of reading one of the most horrifying books I have ever read: The Double Life of Mr Alfred Burton. It was written by the delightful E Phillips Oppenheim, who also wrote one of my favourite tales of mistaken identity, The Great Impersonation.
Grenville Kleiser is a name that will doubtless continue to be revered in many years time. His pretensions are apparent in his bibliography (here considerably abbreviated): Business Building and Speech Efficiency; Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases: A Practical Handbook Of Pertinent Expressions, Striking Similes, Literary, Commercial, Conversational, And Oratorical Terms, For The Embellishment Of Speech And Literature, And The Improvement Of The Vocabulary Of Those Persons Who Read, Write, And Speak English; How to Build Mental Power; How to Develop Power and Personality in Speaking; How to Develop Self Confidence in Speech and Manner; Make Your Life Worth Living; Phrases for Public Speakers and Paragraphs for Study; Talks on Talking; Talking for Results; The Training of a Public Speaker; and Training for Power and Leadership.
