Beowulf or When Poetry Mattered

Via Books Inq.

When poetry mattered--a performance (or segment thereof) of Beowulf

A brief taste:

Poetry today is, for the most part, deeply embedded in the secular culture, and there is no affirmative available to that culture, since the affirmative depends on a belief in something other than, larger than, the self. Today's denial of the spirit and celebration of the now and the now alone blocks any ability to sound the affirmative, to strike the strings that soul sing, and higher sing. It's the solution that Wallace Stephens sought but could never attain, as he notes in The Man with the Blue Guitar

Superb--well said and painfully truthful as regards the poetry world today, and really, for some time.

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