Six years ago this week, literature professor and prolific author Roger Lundin died from cardiac arrest. This week’s Friday Feature presents two interviews with Lundin from our Journal. The first is from 1993, and was prompted by his book, The Culture of Interpretation; Christian Faith and the Postmodern World. The second interview was done in 2014, and Lundin talked with Ken Myers about themes in his book, Beginning with the Word: Modern Literature and the Question of Belief.
34 minutes
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Writing in The American Scholar in 1991, critic Bruce Bawer claimed that Richard Wilbur is “the outstanding contemporary instance of the type of poet who writes in strict forms about traditional themes, and whose poems—making, as they do, frequent, appropriate, and instructive use of meter, rhyme, imagery, alliteration, assonance, and even the occasional classical allusion—could serve as models in a textbook of prosody.” But the attentive (and therefore delighted) reader will take less note of Wilbur’s model practice than of the sense of marveling that saturates his work. As David Lyle Jeffreyobserves in his article, “God’s Patient Stet,” the sense of consistency one perceives in Wilbur’s work “emerges not only from his craftsmanship as a poet but from his constancy as an affectionate observer of creation, both Nature and human nature.” Jeffrey’s article focuses on the poems in Wilbur’s 2010 anthology Anterooms, especially those that are more explicitly Biblical or theological in their allusions.
This essay is featured courtesy of First Things, where it was originally published in July/August 2011. It is read by Ken Myers. This feature is available to listeners with a Mars Hill Audio membership or a First Things affiliate membership.
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