Shakespeare Removed By Starmer

[Khandro]

The Bard of Stratford upon Avon wrote during the reign of Elizabeth 1, she in turn was queen during a time when there was slavery, therefore ................ he has to go ! 

https://archive.ph/JwSjE

Philistinism, wokism or both ? 

[Atheist]

NJ; Try Joan Hunter Dunne. You might enjoy it.

[Atheist]

Sorry NJ. Should be Dunn.

[Khandro]

NJ //... and [I know] next to nothing about an awful lot of things.  Literature in general and poetry in particular fits firmly into that last category.//

With respect: I don't know if you are a judge or a jino (judge in name only)😉    But if you are a real judge, imo  you should know about one of the greatest judgements of European culture; that of Paris.

And if you haven't read Homer's Iliad you won't know what the 'Judgement of Paris' is, and if you don't know that, you won't know what the Trajan war was all about, and if you don't know what the Trajan war was about, you won't also know about the context of The Odyssey,  and if you don't know what that was, you won't know why the final chapter of the 'Wind in the Willows' (which I'm just re-reading after 50 years, with great chuckles) is called, The Return of Ulysses. 🙄

[HeavensToBetsy]

// And so another way he goes //

// It’s just that I like the words to be in the right order //

Hmm.  

// What are these life-changing powers //

It’s difficult to put into words.  But great works of literature have definitely changed my life.  They have certainly enriched it, and fired my imagination.  As for word order, I’d argue that an ‘uncommon’ word order is not necessarily an ‘incorrect’ one.  Take the last line of Milton’s Lycidas, for example: “Tomorrow to fresh woods, and pastures new.’  Perfectly intelligible, but in my opinion far more elegant than “Tomorrow [he would go to] fresh woods and new pastures.” And I think many other people would agree with me; Milton’s phrase has passed into the language, even if many people misquote “fresh woods” as “fresh fields”. 

That said, I feel NJ could have chosen a better example of great English literature than Wordsworth’s “Daffodils”. I think there are far better poets than Wordsworth, the poet who described a pond (in his poem “The Thorn”) like this:

"I’ve measured it from side to side:

‘Tis three feet long, and two feet wide."

Personally, when it comes to the Romantic poets, I’d choose Keats over Wordsworth any day, and Shelley over both of them.  I prefer Shelley’s description of dead leaves in ‘Ode to the West Wind’ as ‘pestilence-stricken multitudes’ to the sensuality and dubious fluids alluded to in ‘To Autumn’, although they are both great poems.  

// You shouldn’t need to analyse a short passage to find out what it means. //

It’s curious, then, that many members of the legal profession have had lucrative careers doing exactly that.  Students of literature, however, are more likely to try to analyse the ‘how’ as opposed to the ‘what’.  Keats wrote that ‘a thing of beauty is a joy forever’ and there are few things more beautiful than the English language in the hands of an expert.  That’s not to say that a perfectly-executed James Ward-Prowse free kick is not also a thing of beauty - but it is possible to appreciate and enjoy both.  

It’s ironic that NJ is so dismissive of poetry and prose when he is clearly well aware of the power of language.  His posts are amongst the most carefully-written on this site - despite a curious inability to accept that words can mean more than one thing.  I remember one post where he became somewhat irritated when ‘milk’ was used to refer to something other than the fluid produced by lactating mammals.  I can understand the need to avoid ambiguity in a legal document, but I believe our language would be far poorer if we had to refer to Milk of Magnesia as ‘Magnesium hydroxide’ or if Lady Macbeth had not described her husband as ‘too full of the milk of human kindness’. 

As on many other things, I’m afraid NJ and I are just going to have to disagree on this one.  But NJ, you don’t know what you’re missing.