Joseph Pearce's Poetry List

 

Joseph Pearce shows up in the strangest places.

I used to teach at a classical education school. Although I'm now retired, I still get catalogs from companies from which I ordered classical materials. One of those companies is Memoria Press, which puts out a publication called The Classical Teacher.

Amid the lists of catechetical materials in the most recent edition of that publication there are several articles, including one by Joseph Pearce: "Poems Everyone Should Know."

He lists the poems in three categories: Epics, Verse Drama, and Lyric Poetry.

Epics:

The Iliad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer

The Aeneid - Virgil 
Beowulf

The Divine Comedy - Dante

He gives an honorable mention to The Lord of the Rings, which he describes an a prose epic, not a novel, but since is is not a poem, it does not make the official list.

Verse Drama:

Antigone
Oedipus Rex
Oedipus at Colonus
Hamlet
King Lear

Lyric poetry

"Upon the Image of Death" - Saint Robert Southwell
"Hymn Before Sunrise" - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
"The Wreck of The Deutschland" - Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Wasteland - T. S. Eliot
"Tarantella" - Hilaire Belloc

Interesting list. I take pride in that I've read all but one them, having somehow missed encountering "Hymn Before Sunrise." 

Guess I have to find that lyric just to say I've read them all next time I run into Pearce.

The Books Have Arrived!

Okay, as if it didn't already have too many books (Too many books? Is there such a thing?) two more waiting at my front door this morning.

In the latest Saint Austen Review (StAR) I read a review of of Holly Ordway's Tolkien's Faith: A Spiritual Biography. The review sparked my interest, so noticing it was put out by Bishop Barron's Word on Fire I went to the WoF website to order it. While searching for the title in the online catalog I spotted The Golden Key And Other Fairy Tales by George MacDonald. So naturally I had to order that one too!

Add them to my "To Read" pile.

  

The latest Saint Austin Review: Chesterton!

 

The always delightful Saint Austen Review (StAR) has come out with an issue dedicated to G. K. Chesterton and Fulton Sheen: Defenders of the Faith. 

In addition to the Joseph Pearce editorial focusing on that subject, the May/June 2024 edition features such articles as:

"On Considering a Present-Day Chesterton" by Lindsay Schlegal
"Sherlock Holmes and Father Brown: From Logic to Metaphysics" by Robert Lazu Kmita
"A Beautiful Failure Called G. K.'s Weekly" by Luca Fumagalli
"Friends in the Faith: Chesterton and Sheen" by James M. Patterson
"Literary Influences on Fulton J. Sheen" by Joseph Tuttle (one of them being Chesterton)

And more on Sheen, plus articles about Mozart, Steve McQueen, modern technology, art, and of course, some poetry and book reviews.

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