Baylor Great Texts

In every great artistic and literary revival and "renaissance" I know of, people have reached back BEHIND what their near contemporaries have been doing, to recover what had been forgotten in the meantime. Thus did the Pearl-poet and Langland and their ilk reach back behind the influences of French literature to recover an earlier English form of poetry, and we have that brief and utterly unique and brilliant "alliterative revival." Thus did the Italian humanists reach back behind the Latin of the schoolmen, and even behind the poetry of Dante himself, to recover the ancient rhetoricians and sometimes indeed to find lost works and to edit and publish them, and we have the Italian Renaissance, and its resurgence of interest in Cicero, Livy, Tacitus, and other rhetoricians and historians, and also in the Fathers of the Church. There is no Martin Luther or Council of Trent without the likes of Lorenzo Valla. Thus did Spenser reach back behind his more Italianate contemporaries to recover Chaucer (though Spenser was profoundly influenced by Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso) and the Arthurian legends. Thus did Dryden, Swift, and Pope reach back behind the religious and erotic lyricists of the 17th century to recover the classical satirists Horace and Juvenal. Thus did Wordsworth and the Romantics reach back behind Pope to recover Milton -- and Spenser, and medieval art such as they understood it. Thus did Donatello quite literally DIG UP classical sculptures -- Roman copies of Greek originals -- to help bring into being a new age in western art. Thus did Eliot reach back behind the antiquarianism of (some) Edwardian and Georgian poetry to recover the so-called Metaphysical poets, and also Dante, whose star had been eclipsed outside of Italy during the 18th century, but who had come back into the limelight in the 19th. When somebody asked Sergei Eisenstein where he learned how to direct a film, he answered, "From Milton." From the blind poet -- but if you know Milton, you can easily see how it would be. Maybe someday people will say, "You know, the old [fill in the blank] knew what they were doing, and we haven't been doing what they did." Then they will begin the humbling work of recovery. For it's been a very long time that we've suffered under the modernist delusion that we no longer need to learn from our forebears. There will be a heck of a lot of wheels to reinvent.