Friday Links, March 11, 2022

+ Looking for a community of writers and artists? Check out Catholic Literary Arts.

+ Poet Richard Wilbur’s witness to Christian virtue.

+ Who is taking up the mantle of Maritain, Hildebrand, and Gilson? Thomas Mirus asks James Matthew Wilson.

+ The joke’s on Satan: Jacob Riyeff writes about how the devil tricked himself.

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Richard Wilbur

First, I started a conversation about the above-linked article on a Facebook group whose members are editors and other miscellaneous contributors (like me) this way, “Interesting (long) interview with Richard Wilbur from a 1992 issue of a publication of the Conference on Christian Literature. What do y'all think of him as a poet?”

I added, “I was intrigued by this:

“CCL has chosen Richard Wilbur to receive a Lifetime Achievement Award because his life and attitudes bear witness to Christian virtue and because his work springs from and enriches Western religious art. His love for and sensitivity to his fellow creatures, his humility before the natural world, and his openness to the supernatural are all marked by a Christian sense of grace. He has insisted more than once that all great art is religious, that metaphor and simile by definition move toward the perception of an underlying unity.”

I got this one reply, which was Liked by Bernardo Aparicio, Dappled Things Founder and Publisher, Rosemary Callenberg, DT associate editor, and Katy Carl, DT editor in chief, and by me:

“Dick Wilbur might have been the most perfect American poet of the 20th century, and he was almost certainly the healthiest. There is a good cheer in his poems that's reminiscent of Chaucer, Shakespeare's comedies, and Burns, and he's also a wizard with technique. In his large 'Collected Poems,' there's not a single bad poem, and there are a few dozen that deserve to last as long as the English language. He was also the best translator of French our language has ever known, by a wide margin. And he wrote brilliant children's books, and gently insightful essays. Having fought in the trenches in WWII, he recognized the necessity of beauty and the urgency of grace like no other poet of the 20th century, and his work embodies those virtues, along with wit, elegance, compassion, and the courage of humility.”—Ryan Wilson

Dear readers, if you have an opinion on this, join the conversation in the Comments. What do you think of Richard Wilbur as a Christian poet?

Beyond Maritain, Hildebrand, and Gilson: developing Catholic aesthetics

In the above-linked clip from a Catholic Culture podcast, Thomas Mirus asks James Matthew Wilson for a (necessarily) brief answer to this question, “I would love to hear thoughts on applying early to mid-century Catholic aesthetic thinking. Who is taking up the mantle of Maritain, Hildebrand, and Gilson today?”

I’ll let you listen to Wilson’s answer for yourself, in which he focuses more on How the development of Catholic aesthetics from these thinkers needs to be carried on, rather than on Who is taking up the work. But first, here is Rosemary Callenberg’s remark, as a preview, “What a brilliant answer!”

The Devil Gets the Hook: Atonement, Passion, and Levity

Katy Carl writes about the above-linke article, “Poet & translator Jacob Riyeff talks sin, atonement, & divine comedy in Spirit & Life.”