The Philosophical Optimist

 Here is another essay on poetry.  As the date shows, it's been a while since I wrote it.  It can serve as an example for my students, but all are free to read and enjoy.           Charles Brent Oliver Dr. Borges ENGL 1020 SA1 5 March 2015 A Close Reading of Tennyson’s “the Eagle”             Tennyson’s poem, “the Eagle,” is a mainstay of introductory poetry courses and textbooks.   The reason for this is obvious: it is very brief, and far simpler than many more complex poems (anything by Milton comes to mind).   However, although simple, it is also elegant and beautiful, and the product of much more conscious effort than might appear at first glance.   Some sense of this effort can be gleaned through an examination of the poem’s use of certain musical devices, specifically alliteration, consonance, and rhyme.         ...

              There’s nothing like binge-watching your favorite franchise to help you see the larger patterns in the weave, and having just recently achieved one of my more minor lifetime reading goals of absorbing all of Shakespeare by binging a large number of Shakespearean film adaptations, I find myself itching to share with someone some of my observations.   Since the day I write this is the Fourth of July, it seems appropriate to begin with observations that connect Shakespeare to us here in America, even, more specifically, us here in the American South.             It should not surprise anyone that Shakespeare’s English shares certain properties with English here in the American South, given that the history of the South begins in his lifetime.   The very first of the Colonies was, after all, Virginia, named in honor of Shakespeare’s own Queen Elizabe...

            After our previous salute to the excellent short-lived series Dead Like Me , we now turn to an even more tragic tale, the tale of Ned and Stacey.   While Debra Messing's later homage to all things queer, Will & Grace , went on for season after asinine season, making us laugh in spite of ourselves even as our IQs plunged with every episode, her earlier, far more intelligent series was killed after only two seasons, just as it was poised to really get good.   The key to Ned and Stacey , a show about two shallow people who contract a fake marriage for the purposes of mutual exploitation (the tag line: "To get a promotion, I needed a wife.   To get a life, I needed his apartment") was that the show was not just about them, but also about Stacey's sister Amanda and her husband Eric.             Eric and Amanda Moyer served as a foil to the eponymous...

[Since I did not have time to compose the essay I wanted this month, I here present the first of two short entries from an earlier blog of mine.  Although these posts were first written about 10 years ago or so, I think what they say is still relevant, perhaps more than ever.]             William Butler Yeats, in his poem   "The Second Coming," said "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"; so it seems ever to be.   As a fan of such great dramatists as Shaw and Shakespeare (not in that order), I want to believe that great drama can still be written, and that such great drama can be found not just on the stage, but on the screens, both big and small.   However, Yeats' words remind me that it is the way of the world for things to fall apart, and I am continually disappointed to find an inverse proportion prevailing between the brilliance of a television show, and the length...