So did Shakespeare, and they're consistently trying to marginalize him.
I think the biggest thing with Dickens is that his work can be turned into arguments in favor of progressive points of view. Christmas Carol = "see how the rich are exploiting the common man!" Oliver Twist = "see how the system was (or is) exploiting poor innocent children!" Heck, I could even see someone trying to twist Tale of Two CIties into an argument about how Darnay shows how we should be more welcoming to refugees.
That’s true but A Christmas Carol is a great redemption story and Scrooge didn’t need the govt to make him change his ways. But I could totally see it being perverted.
I have no problem if you want to include quality not white authors. Key word quality. Like I think Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery is a great book because it shows that where you start in life doesn’t have to be where you end up.
But we live in the west so it’s imperative to learn about the great western authors.
Keats is an important Romantic poet . . . kinda precious but steeped in a fascinating 19th-century English nature worship with most of the others of that era. Hardy is great--"Drummer Hodge" is a Boer War classic I revere from my childhood and they'll probably toss his novels, too. Owen and Sassoon are important if we want to remember WWI and the horrific impact it had, annihilating an entire generation of Englishmen and exposing the psychological effects of the English class system. Can't have Englishmen understanding their past, no, everything must be burned and history reset to begin in 2022.
This latest purge of canonical Western poets is yet more Soviet-style scrubbing of history to focus on the utterly unimportant, uninteresting self-absorbed trash written by ham-fisted shitheads with the correct skin color and sex organs.
Is there anything the left will not destroy? Douglas Murray is right.
I
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Uncoffined—just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound.
II
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew—
Fresh from his Wessex home—
The meaning of the broad Karoo,
The Bush, the dusty loam,
And why uprose to nightly view
Strange stars amid the gloam.
III
Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge for ever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow up a Southern tree,
And strange-eyed constellations reign
His stars eternally.
Right--persecuted minorities and their champions in English departments, college/state bureaucracies, and newsrooms everywhere. Fuck these people. Barbarians and philistines, the lot of 'em.
Fully get that poetry isn't everyone's bag, and that's cool. I hated when we had it in school. I really like Keats. Great master of the meter and sounds of his poems. his imagery gets me.
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew,
And on thy cheeks a fading rose
Fast withereth too.
I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful—a faery’s child,
Her hair was long, her foot was light,
And her eyes were wild.
I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.
I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried—‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall!’
I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gapèd wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill’s side.
The last poem he ever wrote, as he lay dying at age 26. He had a whole lifetime of creation in front of him.
"This living hand, now warm and capable"
This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calm’d–see here it is–
I hold it towards you.
Anyone and anything assigned in class to youths is boring. The act of making it a regimented and evaluated process refines out any happiness that may have once existed in it.
I won't miss either one, but what substitutions are they plugging in their place?
If they ever try to cancel Dickens, the first bloody battle of literature wars is on!
They wouldn’t be dumb enough to do that. Dickens has a massive impact on literature
So did Shakespeare, and they're consistently trying to marginalize him.
I think the biggest thing with Dickens is that his work can be turned into arguments in favor of progressive points of view. Christmas Carol = "see how the rich are exploiting the common man!" Oliver Twist = "see how the system was (or is) exploiting poor innocent children!" Heck, I could even see someone trying to twist Tale of Two CIties into an argument about how Darnay shows how we should be more welcoming to refugees.
That’s true but A Christmas Carol is a great redemption story and Scrooge didn’t need the govt to make him change his ways. But I could totally see it being perverted.
I have no problem if you want to include quality not white authors. Key word quality. Like I think Booker T Washington’s Up From Slavery is a great book because it shows that where you start in life doesn’t have to be where you end up.
But we live in the west so it’s imperative to learn about the great western authors.
Keats is an important Romantic poet . . . kinda precious but steeped in a fascinating 19th-century English nature worship with most of the others of that era. Hardy is great--"Drummer Hodge" is a Boer War classic I revere from my childhood and they'll probably toss his novels, too. Owen and Sassoon are important if we want to remember WWI and the horrific impact it had, annihilating an entire generation of Englishmen and exposing the psychological effects of the English class system. Can't have Englishmen understanding their past, no, everything must be burned and history reset to begin in 2022.
This latest purge of canonical Western poets is yet more Soviet-style scrubbing of history to focus on the utterly unimportant, uninteresting self-absorbed trash written by ham-fisted shitheads with the correct skin color and sex organs.
Is there anything the left will not destroy? Douglas Murray is right.
I
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest Uncoffined—just as found: His landmark is a kopje-crest That breaks the veldt around; And foreign constellations west Each night above his mound.
II
Young Hodge the Drummer never knew— Fresh from his Wessex home— The meaning of the broad Karoo, The Bush, the dusty loam, And why uprose to nightly view Strange stars amid the gloam.
III
Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; His homely Northern breast and brain Grow up a Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally.
There is nothing else except the narrative and there is no authority higher than the state.
Right--persecuted minorities and their champions in English departments, college/state bureaucracies, and newsrooms everywhere. Fuck these people. Barbarians and philistines, the lot of 'em.
Fully get that poetry isn't everyone's bag, and that's cool. I hated when we had it in school. I really like Keats. Great master of the meter and sounds of his poems. his imagery gets me.
"La Belle Dame Sans Merci"
The last poem he ever wrote, as he lay dying at age 26. He had a whole lifetime of creation in front of him.
"This living hand, now warm and capable"
To be fair, Thomas Hardy is fucking boring.
Anyone and anything assigned in class to youths is boring. The act of making it a regimented and evaluated process refines out any happiness that may have once existed in it.