12 November 2023

Clear.

Wyeth, N.C., The Crystal Gazer, 1930


Anthony Esolen on clearing away the noise ...
But there's another source of trouble that I wasn't aware of at the time, and that was not as pronounced then as it is now.  That's the ubiquity of the lousy stuff.  If you pick up a book published in 1900, chances are that it will have been written in fairly competent English, even at the worst, because otherwise it wouldn't have gotten published at all.  My copies of popular magazines from about 1875 to 1920 (I have about 20 years' worth, of The Century, Harper's, Scribners', and a few others) seem sometimes to have been written by members of a lost species of intelligent life.  

Noise works its harm.  If I look at hymns written since 1965, and I compare them with the hymns in any Anglican, Lutheran, or Methodist hymnal from before that time, I see poetic incompetence, vagueness, sometimes bad grammar, and in general a failure to consider that hymn-writing is an art, and you begin to learn an art by patiently attending to what the masters of the art have done before you.  But the noise is everywhere now, and if you're going to start you have to clear away the noise.

Thanks for pointing this out, Kurt. 

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