Buckley and rhetoric

I was pleased to learn that the recently deceased William Buckley was home-schooled. You can read a few paragraphs about it in this article, which included this paragraph:
As a home-schooled student, Buckley, my guess is, had lots of practice answering and asking questions. That is the hallmark of good tutoring. Most teachers acknowledge that good [...]

Great Teachers Making Their Point

The thing about Hallmark cards is that they are too obvious in their intent. To say something profound in such a way that the auditor actually hears it, you cannot say it obviously. If you do, you reduce it to a mere analytical statement, a statement on which they can probably act – but the [...]

How to Read Poetry (again)

Earlier I mentioned things like the music and the images used in a poem and then a third thing (maybe I’ll call it the connotations). But what needs to precede all of that is that the poet has something to say. It’s conceivable that he could use mediocre music and less than perfect imagery and [...]

Welcome aboard Mr. Phillips

The picture doesn’t do justice to the suave good looks of our new blogger Brian Phillips, but it begins to capture some of the authority in his bearing. Brian has recently joined the CiRCE staff as a part time Executive Assistant and his help has already proved invaluable. He’s hard at work improving the look [...]

What Is Education

Education IS the cultivation and development of the faculties of the person being educated, especially those that are uniquely human. For this reason, the arts and music, literature and history, languages and the natural sciences, philosophy and theology ARE the content of education. None of them is an elective. To the extent that anybody lacks [...]

Peter Leithart on Classical Education

Dr. Leithart wrote an article on Classical Education for ISI that was published in the Intercollegiate Review and discusses, among other things, the role of CiRCE and the book I co-authored with Dr. Veith. It’s a very fine article that was summarized in the Dallas Morning News. Click on the latter link for a short [...]

Do I Dare and Do I Dare

Went to Martin Cothran’s blog (Vere loqui) and saw a bunch of easter poems and then a link to Douglas Groothius web site, so I’m emboldened to give it a try. I’ll post a poem I wrote. But you have to promise me to critcize it and make suggestions (to which I have the right [...]

How to Read A Poem (III) Getting Started

Let me simplify: a poem consists of three elements to a greater degree than prose:

Music

Images

Something I haven’t been able to name yet. Maybe I’ll call it immediacy for lack of a better term.

I’m talking about that deep, mysterious connectedness that poems have because a word will carry a meaning for the reader that is based [...]

How to Read A Poem (II)

It can be a great deal easier with an accomplice. For one thing, all good poems have things you will miss the first time or the first ten times you read them. That’s why the poet wrote a poem and not prose.
To caricature, a poem is extremely condensed while prose is much looser. In a [...]

How to Read a Poem

Our word poem comes from the Greek word Poios, which is the word used in the Septuagent version of Genesis 1 and in the Greek version of the Nicene Creed for what God did to the heavens and the earth. It means to make.
 When an artist makes anything, he has an idea in his mind [...]