Thursday, April 02, 2015
No Poetry
Robert Graves, "Dame Ocupacyon" = Lecture V of The Clark Lectures, The Crowning Privilege: Collected Essays on Poetry (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1956) pp. 101-118 (at 115):
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I do not know the present attitude of the Roman Church to poetry, but in 1916, when I was recovering from wounds near Quarr Abbey in the Isle of Wight, the good Benedictine monks tried to persuade me to join their Order after the War. One tempting argument was that they had a wonderful library of 20,000 volumes—on every possible subject—agriculture, music, history, mechanics, printing, mathematics....But I asked Father Blanchon-Lasserve, the Guest-master: 'What about poetry?' 'No, my son,' he answered, 'we have no poetry. It is not necessary.'Related post: Tempted to Convert.
