 Hello fellow followers of Christ and welcome to the show that introduces you to the men and women behind history's greatest works of literature. Come along every week as we explore these renowned authors, the times and genre in which they wrote, why scholars praise their writing and how we as Catholics should read and understand their works. I'm Joseph Pierce and this is The Authority. Hello and welcome to this episode of The Authority. I'm Joseph Pierce. Thanks as always for joining me and we are in the midst of romanticism in terms of English romanticism and specifically the English romantic poets. We looked at William Blake last time. This time and next time we'll be looking at two great, the dynamic duo, if you like, of English romanticism, who came together in 1798 as co-authors of a book of poetry called Lyrical Ballads. And that book would be the definitive birth, if you like, of English romanticism, but it would actually be the conception of the Catholic literary revival. So I'd like to spend just a few minutes looking at that revival because this really is at the center of it, sorry, not the center of it, at the beginning of it. So I see the Catholic literary revival in a broad sweep, beginning in 1798 with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge. We then have what I call a 45-year gestation period during which we have the rise of neo-medievalism, which is a consequence of romanticism. And neo-medievalism takes three forms in England, the Gothic revival in architecture, the most famous example of which is the House of Parliament, Big Ben, etc., in London. And that was designed by Augustus Pugin, who was the primary force behind the Gothic revival in architecture. Augustus Pugin would become a Catholic and this was set a pattern. When it became legal again to build Catholic churches in England, following Catholic emancipation in 1829, many of the new churches that were being built across England, new Catholic churches were built in this neo-Gothic style, the start of the Gothic revival. And as you would think, neo-medievalism in its various manifestations is playing leapfrog over the whole period of the Enlightenment to rediscover the Middle Ages, including Gothic architecture. Another manifestation of neo-medievalism was where the Pre-Raphaelites, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, mostly individual arts, but also in literature, and they particularly, they were seeking, as their name would suggest, a pure vision of art was Pre-Raphael. So Raphael, the artist at the middle of the Renaissance. So prior to Raphael, Pre-Raphael was this medieval early Renaissance centered on Christ with a certain approach to colour. And symbolism. And then from Raphael onwards, we have the late Renaissance, which is more centred on classical imagery, less on biblical imagery. And so the Pre-Raphaelites, as their name suggests, leapfrogged over the whole period of modernity and the late Renaissance to rediscover the purity of the early Renaissance and the medieval, not surprisingly amongst the favourite subjects of the Pre-Raphaelites were knights in shining armour and the Arthurian legends. They were also very taken with painting singers from Shakespeare. So leapfrogging over modernity to seek a purer view from the past. And the third manifestation of neo-medievalism, which sprung from this romanticism, was the Oxford Movement within the Church of England. The leader of the Oxford Movement, or one of the three leaders, was John Henry Newman. And John Henry Newman would be received into the Catholic Church in 1845. And that was what I would call the definitive birth of the Catholic revival, which is why this period of 45 years from the publication of Lyrical Ballads to the reception of Newman to the Church in 1845 is the gestation period. Newman himself says that the romantic poets were very important upon the Oxford Movement, upon his own intellectual and spiritual development. So we see how, in this sense, with English romanticism under the dual leadership of Wordsworth and Coleridge was important to the Catholic revival. Very quickly, so we can get back to William Wordsworth, the subject of this episode of The Authority, that the period from 1845, Newman's conversion to 1890, is what I call the Newman period, as well as Newman's own indomitable presence. We have, for instance, great convert poets such as Conventry Patmore and especially Gerard Manny Hopkins from this period. Then there's what I call Decadent Interlude, the 1890s, the age of Oscar Wilde. Oscar Wilde becomes a Catholic, so do many of the English decadence, the dark path to Christ, the Mary Magdalene path, the path of the penitent. So Oscar Wilde, Orby Beardsley, the artist, Lionel Johnson, the poet, Ernest Dowson, the poet, John Gray, and others. These poets all become Catholics, in the case of John Gray, who was alleged to have been the physical model for Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray, he became a priest. Then 1900, the death of Oscar Wilde, also in G.K. Chesterton, is first published and appeared between 1900 and 1936. I call the Chester Belloc period, the period of which Chesterton and Belloc at the center of the Catholic literary revival. And again, Chesterton is very much in the romantic tradition. I could speak much more about Chesterton's romanticism, but he is, in many ways, romantic to the core in many ways. We need nuances there, but we don't have time to talk about that now. Chesterton dies in 1936. In 1937, the Hobbit is published. And then the next period of the Catholic revival is what I call the Inklings period, the time when Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are at the center of this literary revival. So all of this brings, if you like, from the English romanticism and that burst on the scenes with the popularity of lyrical ballads, this book co-authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. So Wordsworth, like many of his generation, including Coleridge, was initially fascinated and supported the French Revolution, this idealism. But then when they saw how the French Revolution and the French Revolution should be seen in terms of a sort of proto-communism, the French Revolution of 1789 was very much akin to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. And like both revolutions ended up very quickly in turning into a reign of terror, the guillotine being invented to kill lots of people efficiently, the revolution turning first of all upon the rich and then upon the church, where priests and nuns are put to death, and eventually turning upon itself, where the revolution devours its own revolutionaries. And the whole thing descending into anarchy, which is eventually brought to an end when a dictator takes over. That dictator was known as Napoleon, and that leads to a whole period of warfare across Europe. That's the outcome of the revolution. So as with those who initially enamored of the Bolshevik Revolution that were naive about communism, that Wordsworth and Coleridge very quickly became disillusioned with the ideas of revolution and recalled in horror and in a healthy reaction against that sort of secular, fundamentalist, anti-Christian, philosophically materialist ideology towards a return to Christianity. And Coleridge and Wordsworth both become Christians. In the Wordsworth case, he just takes it up again. In Coleridge's case, he becomes a convert. And thereafter, they see romanticism as being a means by which we can approach Christ, approach goodness, truth, and beauty through the experience, through the kiss of beauty itself, through being responsive to the promptings of beauty. Wordsworth would become very successful. He would become Poet Laureate, like John Dryden before. And I'd like to spend some time now looking at some of his poetry to look at his spirit. He wrote a poem called, They Called the Merry England. And this was evoking the Merry England, in other words, the medieval England of the past. So this idea, this new medievalism being embodied or encapsulated in that poem by Wordsworth. We're not gonna read that, but I'm gonna read another poem called, which is a sonnet with the first line being, nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room. So it seems to be about nuns. It's not actually about nuns. It's about the sonnet itself, but we shall see how nuns are here, uses a metaphor for the sonnet and what that might actually mean. So as a sonnet is only 14 lines long, we would indulge ourselves with the reading of it. Nuns fret not at their convent's narrow room. And hermits are contented with their cells, and students with their pensive citadels, maids at the wheel, the weaver at his loom, sit blithe and happy, bees that soar for bloom, high at the highest peak of furnace fells, with murmur by the hour in fox-glove bells. In truth, the prison unto which we doom ourselves, no prison is, and hence for me, in sundry moves, twas past time to be bound, within the sonnet's scanty plot of ground. Pleased if some souls, for such their needs must be, who have felt the weight of too much liberty, should find their brief sonnets there, as I have found. So what's he saying? It's obviously defense of the sonnet, and that, of course, is also plain leapfrog. It's going right back to the Renaissance through the sonnets of Petrarch and of Shakespeare. But the thing about the sonnet, it has a definite form, right? A certain rhyme scheme, a certain number of lines, and different types of sonnets, but they've all set by form and by rule. In other words, that we're not enslaved by a limitation on freedom. This is summed up perhaps by the voice of Edmund Burke, who wrote against the French Revolution, that liberty itself must be limited in order to be possessed. There's a paradox. Liberty itself must be limited in order to be possessed, that if we do not actually have the ability to control ourselves, to self-limit, we will end up being a slave or an addict to sinful habits. And if we become addicted to a certain behavior, an addict is not free. An addict is a slave. That's why Saint Paul talks about being slaves to sin. So here that we're seeing how the sonnet in its limited plot of ground is likened to a nun who freely chooses her cell or a student who chooses to study. In order to be authentically free, we have to accept and embrace a limit on our own liberty. This would be encapsulated by a line from a poem by Oscar Wilde, when he said, anarchy is freedom's own Judas. You kiss, it's the Judas kiss by which freedom is betrayed. So basically this is Wordsworth calling for order, for virtue, for that voluntary self-restraint, which alone allows us to live a good and healthy and therefore beautiful and free life. And of course, this is also a reaction against the anarchy and debauchery of the French Revolution and the mass murder, which that entailed. The absence of law ultimately leads to the rule of the biggest gang leader, which is tyranny. If there's no law of the streets, the most ruthless takeover. Okay, so that's nuns fret not at their Convince narrow room, the first line of the Sonnet by Wordsworth. We're now gonna look at probably his most famous poem, sometimes called Daffodils, but sometimes also given the title again of the opening line. It's not a sonnet, but I wandered lonely as a cloud or daffodils. I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high or avails and hills. When all at once I saw a crowd, a host of dancing daffodils, along the lake beneath the trees, 10,000 dancing in the breeze. The waves beside them danced, but they outdid the sparkling waves in glee. A poet could not but be gay in such a laughing company. I gazed and gazed, but little thought, what wealth the show to me had brought. For oft when on my couch I lie, in vacant or impensive mood, they flash upon that inward eye, which is the bliss of solitude. And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. Can it really be so that a romantic poem about pretty flowers can be that important? You better believe it. Let's look at this. Because the beauty here takes two forms. It takes the moment of surprise when he crosses the brow of a hill and sees in front of them this sea of beautiful golden flowers dancing in the breeze with the lake behind it. It's also shimmering, surface shimmering in the breeze. And his breath is taken away by the kiss of beauty. Let's say something about that first. That we are meant to see reality. And Thomas Aquinas teaches us that reality can only be seen with humility. Basically, we have five physical senses which we are meant to use. We're not meant to be blind or deaf. We're meant to be alive to things that we see and the things we hear and smell and taste and feel. But we also have what we might call five metaphysical senses, humility. And the fruit of humility is gratitude. The fruit of gratitude is that our eyes are open in wonder. And it's only when our eyes are open in wonder that we are moved to contemplation. And it's only when we're moved to contemplation that we receive the gift of dilation, dilatatcio, where our mind and heart and soul open into the fullness of reality which is the fullness of the presence of God which can only be experienced if we have that childlike humility in the first place. This is Thomas Aquinas, arguably the greatest philosopher who ever lived that says this. This is what's being demonstrated here. You can live your life being deaf and blind and hard or you can experience the fullness of God's presence in the beauty of his creation. God the poet in the experience of the poetry of his creation, the dancing flowers, the lake, the human, the beauty of the human humble soul who in gratitude can experience in wonder and be moved to the contemplation that led to the writing of this poem. The alternative is to live the way we live our lives today by distracting ourselves to death. Just spending more time with our gadgets than with our God, with our face down in our mobile phone and not our eyes up to heaven or at the beauty of the sunset or the beauty of the sunrise. We're distracting ourselves to death. We're not even alive. This is a poem written by a poet who's alive but not just the moment of beauty when he's kissed by the presence, the surprising presence of the scene. But more importantly, perhaps it stays with him in memory to be retained in gratitude for oft when on my couch I lie in vacant or impensive mood. They flash upon that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude. And then my heart with pleasure fills and dances with the daffodils. If we have a humble soul open to the kiss of beauty, it doesn't pass away. We can retain it. It remains because we can retain it in our memory and recall it when we have moments of solitude, moments of silence all too rare in our frenetic frantic culture. We can recall it to mind and our heart can dance with the daffodils. This is a profoundly philosophical poem. All right, let's move on. And I want to, the words with becomes are said, well, he becomes more deeply Christian as time goes on. He's on his path to Christ. And there's this wonderful poem to the Virgin and there aren't many more beautiful. I mean, obviously the Blessed Virgin Mary has been the source of much contemplation, much great art, both visually in terms of music, in terms of praise, the great Mary and antiphons, the Blessed Virgin in art, but Donovan child painters of the assumption, et cetera. But seldom has there been a more beautiful poem to the Blessed Virgin than this sonnet to the Virgin by William Wordsworth. Mother whose virgin bosom was uncrossed with the least shade of thought of to sin allied. Woman above all women glorified, our tainted nature's solitary boast. Pureer than foam on central ocean tossed, brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn with fancied roses than the unblemished moon before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast, thy image falls to earth. Yet some, I wean, not unforgiven, the suppliant knee might bend as to a visible power in which did blend all that was mixed and reconciled in thee of mother's love with maiden purity of high with low celestial with terrine. Terrine here, of course, earthly, heavenly with earthly. To me, there's one particular line in this which is especially special. Our tainted nature's solitary boast. We, of course, are fallen, broken, sinful. This is actually unusual because this is clearly an allusion to the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, which was not even formalized in the Catholic Church until after this, although, of course, it had been believed for centuries. But it was certainly unusual for an Anglican Christian to have this view of the Blessed Virgin as being immaculately conceived. So mother whose virgin bosom was uncrossed with the least shade of thought to sin allied. Unblemished, unstained, pure, our tainted nature's solitary boast. I hope you see here that in William Wordsworth, we have a return to an understanding of Christianity and Christendom that would form the basis, as I said, as the launching pad or the springboard for the Catholic revival. It was the works of Wordsworth and Coleridge that would inspire the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood, the Gothic revival in architecture, the Oxford movement, the conversion of St. John Henry Newman, the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, et cetera. That this romantic spirit is with us still, that it's been, if you like, the dominant force in the last, certainly the last 150 or so years, 200 years since, plus now, my word, mathematics. 1798, so 225 years since the publication of Lyrical Ballads. So for that, these figures, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who will be the subject of the authority next time, really are giant figures. They're a dynamic duo, much more important than Batman and Robin. And on that whimsical note, we'll bid you adieu for this week. Thanks so much as always for joining me on The Authority. Please do join me next time. I'm Joseph Pierce and until next time, as always, goodbye and God bless. This has been an episode of The Authority with Joseph Pierce, brought to you by TAN. 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