ART WARS:
A Terrible Beauty
On this date in 1905, Robert Penn Warren, the first poet laureate of the United States, was born.
This is also the date of Ireland’s 1916 Easter Monday rebellion, of which Yeats wrote that “a terrible beauty is born,” and the date of Vatican I’s 1870 attack on reason, Dei Filius.
My comment on Yeats’s remarks:
“No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’d see you damned first.”
— James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist, published 1914-15 in serial form
My comment on the Vatican’s remarks:
“[Robert Penn] Warren taught for years at Yale and became toward the end of his life one of the most vocal critics of deconstruction, which had Yale as its headquarters. He is said to have exclaimed, ‘They got a whole new line of bullshit up here.’ ”
Warren wrote that
“…only, only,
In the name of Death do we learn
the true name of Love.”
For some clues as to whether this, too, is bullshit, see my note of Easter Monday 2003,