Episode 283: Catching Up with Jason Baxter – Dante, Teacher as Translator, Learning to Read Poetry Like C.S. Lewis, and Hot Takes

This week on The Literary Life Podcast, Angelina and Thomas are once again joined Dr. Jason Baxter, author of Why Literature Still Matters. In this episode, our hosts sit down with Dr. Baxter for a chat about a wide variety of topics, including teaching the old books, reading poetry to understand it, the delight of teaching students at HHL, their hot takes on hot takes, making reading recommendations, and translating Dante, and so much more. We will be back next week with a “best of” episode covering Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party,” and after that we begin a fun new series on The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling.

Here is Jason’s article on poetry, “Two Secrets for Reading Poetry Like C. S. Lewis.” To sign up for Dr. Baxter’s class “How to Read a Poem Like C. S. Lewis,” visit HouseofHumaneLetters.com. You can also learn more about his fall HHL class “Plato’s Ghost: Plato’s Legacy in the History of Classical and Christian Art.” Listen to Reading Dante’s “Divine Comedy” with Jason Baxter over on The New Mason Jar podcast.

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Commonplace Quotes:

To some he was a god; to others something more like a headmaster. It was very inconvenient, for he had not a god’s privilege of omniscience, and it is generally supposed that there are many things that a headmaster does not know.

D. C. Somervell, from Disraeli and Gladstone

And I to him: 
"I am one who notes
when love is breathed within,
and how he speaks inside,
I try to symbolize."

Dante Alighieri, from Purgatorio (trans. by Jason Baxter)

These consideration suggest that the literature of the past may be interesting not because it is “modern,” but for exactly the opposite reason: because it is different. Perhaps the history of literary expression may be valuable to us, not because of a monotonous sameness, but because of a refreshing variety of attitude and technique.

D. W. Robertson, Jr., from A Preface to Chaucer

Binsey Poplars

by Gerard Manley Hopkins

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled,
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun,
  All felled, felled, are all felled;
    Of a fresh and following folded rank
                Not spared, not one
                That dandled a sandalled
         Shadow that swam or sank
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank.
        
  O if we but knew what we do
         When we delve or hew —
     Hack and rack the growing green!
          Since country is so tender
     To touch, her being só slender,
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball
     But a prick will make no eye at all,
     Where we, even where we mean
                 To mend her we end her,
            When we hew or delve:
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been.
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve
     Strokes of havoc unselve
           The sweet especial scene,
     Rural scene, a rural scene,
     Sweet especial rural scene.

Book List:

The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis by Jason Baxter

Poetic Meter and Poetic Form by Paul Fussell

The Great War and Modern Memory by Paul Fussell

The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa

Why Literature Still Matters by Jason Baxter

The Divine Comedy: Inferno by Dante Alighieri, trans. by Jason Baxter

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