One of the features that I think best defines the spirit of modern man is wistful retrospection. There is an unwillingness or just an inability to let go of the things that have preceded us. While T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land is not a personal favourite, the older I get the more I realise its profundity in expressing this condition better than any other work that I know of.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water.
Of course human beings have always been preoccupied with the legacy of the past and how it may be relevant in the present. The Renaissance for example was, I understand perfectly well, a period of rediscovery of the thinking of classical antiquity. But if we interact with the art of that period it feels entirely rooted in its own time: it’s not an aesthetic looking backward at all. If anything, it looks happily ahead:
Come live with me and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove,
That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
Woods, or steepy mountain yields.
And we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers to whose falls
Melodious birds sing Madrigals.from “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)
There is no melancholy struggle with the past here: the classical motifs of the pastoral are not as ‘fragments shored against my ruins’ (to quote Eliot). They are not anachronistic: there is nothing ironic with them: they feel entirely natural and appropriate to Marlowe and his era.
Compare that to the major poets post 1945. In English, prominent examples would be Seamus Heaney, Les Murray, Geoffrey Hill and Derek Walcott, to name a handful. What runs through all of these is a kind of constant, intense grappling with the past. Being children of the modern world, they cannot help but sprint forward with everyone else: they too are dictated by the breakneck pace of modernity. But it is as though their heads are turned one hundred and eighty degrees while doing so. They can only look backward: tears running down their faces as they see everything being lost on the headlong march.
I suppose in some sense that this project of mine is rooted in the preoccupation. I fear that the poetry that has helped shape communication and culture since time immemorial is at risk of being lost. I am convinced of its wisdom, its beauty and its civilising properties and in a world that more and more is turning toward barbarity I want it to continue to be relevant.
I would like to take the opportunity to highlight two similar projects out there that deserve attention. The first is a recently created Youtube channel dedicated to explaining the relevance of Shakespeare to a modern-day audience. Not in academic waffle, but in layman’s terms. The first video is on Much Ado About Nothing:
The second is a Swedish music project by the name of Psalmprojektet. You can visit the website here https://psalmprojektet.se/iden-till-psalmprojektet/. The goal of the project is to record every single psalm from the Swedish hymnal. There is a total of 325 of them and the project has been going strong since 2020. Many of the songs, whose tunes and words have echoed from every little parish in the country, are at risk of being silenced forever: