The After Dinner Scholar

”Ode to Constantine XI” with Prof. Adam Cooper

O last of Rome, among small-minded citizens,

The bickering children of your mother’s house,

Your gaze was calm and grave and kind

As is the glowing lamp

Upon the holy ikon’s deep-set brow.

Those lines are from the latest issue of the Wyoming Catholic College publication Integritas. They are the beginning of a poem called “Ode to Constantine XI” by Prof. Adam Cooper. While this podcast has featured any number of conversations about poem, it is a rare treat to feature a poem along with the poet.

To read "Ode to Constantine XI in Integritas click this link.

 

George Herbert’s Easter Poems with Dr. Glenn Arbery

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

      Though foolishly he lost the same,

            Decaying more and more,

                  Till he became

                        Most poore:

                        With thee

                  O let me rise

            As larks, harmoniously,

      And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

 

These lines are from George Herbert's poem "Easter Wings." Herbert, a contemporary of William Shakespeare and John Milton, lived 1593 to 1633. In addition to being a poet he was a Church of England priest and theologian. Wyoming Catholic College president Dr. Glenn Arbery has long been an admirer of Herbert’s metaphysical poetry including “Easter Wings” and a poem simply entitled “Easter.”

The Nature of Poetry: Socrates‘ Dialogue with Ion with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

Each semester here at Wyoming Catholic College, we hold an “All-School Seminar.” All students, faculty, and any interested staff read the same work and meet in groups led by our seniors to discuss what they’ve read. This fall’s All-School Seminar was Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Ion.

In the dialogue, Socrates greets Ion, a rhapsode, that is, a reciter of poetry. Ion specializes in the work of the epic poet Homer—The Iliad and The Odyssey. When Socrates meets him, he is returning from a religious festival where in competition with other rhapsodes, he took first prize for his recitation.

This week, Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos, shares with us about Socrates’ and Ion’s conversation.

Aeneas: Journey into the Underworld with Dr. Adam Cooper

After fleeing the destruction of Troy while leading his young son and carrying his aged father, Aeneas wandered seven years across the Mediterranean. Finally, after his father's death, he and his ships made landfall in Italy. This was the land of his destiny. There he would conquer, establish the Trojans, and found the kingdom that would become Rome.

But before setting out to war, Aeneas told the Sibyl of Apollo, “Since here, they say, are the gates of Death’s king and the dark marsh where the Acheron comes flooding up, please, allow me to go and see my beloved father, meet him face-to-face.”

Dr. Adam Cooper has been reading Virgil’s Aeneid with our Wyoming Catholic College sophomores, guiding them as the Sibyl guided Aeneas into the Underworld.

"As Kingfishers Catch Fire" with Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring;

Gerard Manley Hopkin’s sonnet, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” has become one of the poems Wyoming Catholic College graduates memorized over the course of four years. And it’s the one our seniors, as a class, recited during their weekend of graduation festivities. The recitation was led by Dr. Pavlos Papadopoulos who has a great personal love for this challenging poem.

George Herbert's "Love (III)" with Dr. Tiffany Schubert

“Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,” begins George Herbert’s poem “Love (III).” It’s one of the 26 poems students at Wyoming Catholic College memorize over their four years and one of the most beloved.

George Herbert, an Anglican clergyman, lived a mere 39 years, from 1593 to 1633. Yet the great Puritan pastor and theologian, Richard Baxter said of him, “Herbert speaks to God like one that really believeth in God, and whose business in the world is most with God. Heart-work and heaven-work make up his books.”

Dr. Tiffany Schubert  taught the poem this year and began this interview by telling us something about poet George Herbert.

Can Science Fiction Be the Epic of Our Times? with Dr. Frederick Turner

It makes no sense at first: a band of heroes,
Led by an old man with a bolo tie,
Who saved a world that was not worth saving.
There’s nothing for it then but to explain.
Perhaps for most of you it’s history,
But there’s a right way and a wrong way
To tell a story, and this on is epic.

Thus begins Fredrick Turner’s modern science fiction epic, Apocalypse. It’s the third sci-fi epic he has written and like Homer, Virgil, Milton, and Dante before him, he has written them in verse.

Dr. Turner is a poet, a cultural critic, a playwright, a philosopher of science, an interdisciplinary scholar, an aesthetician, an essayist and a translator, as well as the author of 28 books, including Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science; Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion and Education; and Epic: Form, Content, and History. 

Dr. Turner, now retired Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Texas Dallas, delivered a lecture here at Wyoming Catholic College.  While he was in Lander, Dr. Turner was kind enough to join us for a podcast interview.

Dr. Turner's lecture can be found here.

Dante: "The Infinite Beauty of the World" with Dr. Jason Baxter

In his Divine Comedy, writes Wyoming Catholic College professor Dr. Jason Baxter, Dante “intentionally gathered creatures, places, landscapes, and practices from across the world and types of encyclopedic texts and then filled his book with their imagines; and, second, the poet consistently and insistently constructs moment in which we—along with the pilgrim—must take it all in at a glance, as if we are viewing the whole imago mundi from above.”

That quotation from Dr. Baxter comes from his new scholarly book, The Infinite Beauty of the World: Dante’s Encyclopedia and the Names of God published in time for the commemoration of Dante Alighiri’s death in 1321. And certainly anyone who has read the Commedia is well acquainted with the whirl of images and ideas contained in every Canto.

In this edition of The After-Dinner Scholar, Dr. Baxter discusses his new scholarly book as well as making Dante accessible to non-scholars.

Carpe Diem: The Poetry of Horace with Prof. Eugene Hamilton

In 1959 Oxford University Press published a 200-page book containing 451 translations (half of them in English) of a single 16-line Latin poem, Ad Pyrrham or “The Ode to Pyrrha.” The poet—now nearly forgotten—was perhaps the most influential poet of all time. His name: Quintus Horatius Flaccus, known in the English-speaking world as Horace.

For 2,000 years Horace was admired as possibly the greatest poet in history. And then Latin—especially advanced Latin—became a thing of the past and few were able to read his grammatically complex works. Today, of course, poetry itself has become passé.

But at Wyoming Catholic College, Latin is a required subject and poems are read, studied, and memorized. Latinist Eugene Hamilton has been helping a group of students work there way through a selection of Horace’s Odes.

Lecture: "Beauty is Truth: How Poetry Enriches Science" by Dr. Tiffany Schubert

The tendency of science to reduce all of the world and life in it to predictable laws of physics is not new. And poets since William Wordsworth two hundred years ago have insisted that life ought not to be reduced.

Since the theme of this year’s Wyoming School was “Beauty is Truth: Science and the Catholic Imagination,” we looked to poets to help us inform our imaginations as we look at world around us, the heavens, and our own human nature.

The poetry we read and discussed is all available online for free. 

• Henry Vaughn, “Water-fall”
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, “God’s Grandeur,” “Pied Beauty,” “The Windhover”
• William Wordsworth, “The World is Too Much With Us,” “The Tables Turned”
• Robert Frost, “Never Again Would Bird’s Song Be the Same”
• Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare”