Now a university in England has rejected the sonnet as too white and Western
First they came for the statues. Now they’ve come for the sonnets:
The University of Salford, a public university in Greater Manchester, England, removed sonnets and other “pre-established literary forms” from a creative writing course assessment, The Telegraph reported.
…A University of Salford slideshow shared with staff stated that teachers have “simplified the assessment offering choice to write thematically rather than to fit into pre-established literary forms…which tend to the products of white western culture,” according to documents cited by The Telegraph.
The slideshow affirmed the change as an example of best practice in “decolonising the curriculum.”
So here’s my offering:
My grief is deep, as deep as oceans vast
But virtue has its own reward, and so
I’ll give up sonnet-writing, and the past
Can sink beneath the waves of gloom so low.
Old Shakespeare, with his bootless bootless cries
No doubt was white and certainly supreme
Let’s stamp him out, and “colonization” dies.
We’ll show fidelity to the new meme.
Oh Wordsworth, even more forlorn are we.
Bereft of your old counsel, now we stand
On a much less wise and quite unpleasant lea
Without the comfort of tradition’s hand.
The poems they write today are stupid shite
And sonnets are too challenging to write.
In researching this post, I came across this sonnet by Wordsworth. I’d never seen it before:
Scorn not the Sonnet; Critic, you have frowned,
Mindless of its just honours; with this key
Shakespeare unlocked his heart; the melody
Of this small lute gave ease to Petrarch’s wound;
A thousand times this pipe did Tasso sound;
With it Camöens soothed an exile’s grief;
The Sonnet glittered a gay myrtle leaf
Amid the cypress with which Dante crowned
His visionary brow: a glow-worm lamp,
It cheered mild Spenser, called from Faery-land
To struggle through dark ways; and, when a damp
Fell round the path of Milton, in his hand
The Thing became a trumpet; whence he blew
Soul-animating strains—alas, too few!
[NOTE: I’ve written posts about the sonnet before. I recommend this one.]
The cowardice of university administrators never ceases to amaze.
We need new colleges and now.
Griffin – we really DO need a wholesale revamping of our educational institutions from K-12 as well university level . . and it needs to be done without consideration to accredidation. The system uses accredidation as the stick to brow beat institutions into accepting the woke nincompoopery that goes on in schools these days. However, convincing parents to send their kid to an unaccredited school will be a challenge.
Old Shakespeare, with his bootless bootless cries
“Bootless cries” is seared in my memory- or had I been John Kerry, it would have been “seared in my memory.” 🙂 In the spring of my 12th grade English class, we were assigned in-class analyses of various Shakespeare sonnets. I have no idea of which sonnet I got assigned. Sonnet 29 stuck in my memory because an unrequited love of mine made the in-class analysis of that sonnet. Funny how memory works.
I spoke with her one time after high school.
Gringo:
We had to memorize a lot of sonnets in junior high and high school. That was one we had to memorize in junior high. Seared in my memory, too – at least, so far.
Is this decision (all too predictable in our mostly-worthless institutions of higher mis-education) more or less insane than the testimony yesterday in Congress of a young Texan abortion-activist (Aimee Arrambide) who declared that men can get pregnant and have abortions? Just when it seems as if the West could hardly sink any lower into degeneracy and lunacy and stupidity, we are confronted with new evidence that the bottom of the abyss has yet to be reached. Coupled with the destructiveness of this illegitimate administration, the cultural decadence currently engulfing the country augurs badly indeed for the future of our troubled republic.
“degeneracy and lunacy and stupidity…”
“Casey at the Bat” comes to mind (even if not a sonnet)…. “Mighty Biden has struck out” etc.
One certainly hopes they’ll all be laughed out of town.
Be an interesting backlash if the “Deplorables” and “Insurrectionists” make it a point to start memorizing all 154 sonnets, start sonnet clubs, etc.
The down side of course is that if “Biden” finds out these sorts of shenanigans, “he” might just decide to ban Shakespeare entirely….
A sonnet is just a sonnet. Conjuring racial characteristics to literary structures is a sign of severe mental illness.
Wait till they find out that when the plays of Shakespear and the other writers of plays of his day were preformed they did not have women as actors.
As I’ve always said:
___________________
A sonnet is only a sonnet.
But a good lim’rick is a joke.
Griffin,
https://www.uaustin.org/
Announced barely six months ago and already has over $100 million in funding and 500 acres for a campus. I forget how many hundreds of qualified Professors they have had apply for teaching positions.
Beautiful is beyond their reach..
Skilly,
For grades 9 – 12 the wife and I sent one of the Little Fireflies to a High School built on the classical tradition. Four years of Latin, one of Ancient Greek. No computers. He memorized plenty of sonnets and learned his geometry from Euclid. Also had to participate in at least one school sport all four years.
He and his wife now homeschool their burgeoning family amid a network of thousands of homeschooling families in our area sharing resources. All the kids in their co-op are one and only one of two possible genders, and the kids with more melanin are not taught that they are oppressed.
Ha ha! Good one, Neo!
What happens to enrollments when white students and parents finally wake up (become “woke”) to the fact that they are the hated group on campuses?
Yes, 800 years of progress in human affairs that began with the Magna Carta is all “too white.” It seems to be lunacy. It’s not. They know exactly what they’re doing. The end of America (and the Anglosphere) as it was meant to be by the founders. The plan is for the United Socialist Sates of America. Change the language, change the arts, change the literature, change the history. Erase it and replace it with the glories of socialism/communism – which killed millions in the Twentieth Century and will kill millions more in this century if they succeed.
Pingback:Poems, Everybody. The Lassie Reckons Herself A Poet – Musings from Brian J. Noggle
The implicit message of the left’s primary propaganda meme is that the only means by which members of the white race can atone for their ancestral sins is by cultural and racial suicide. That meme has been incessantly promoted in the West for many decades.
An accurate metric of the meme’s effectiveness is the lowered testosterone levels in young men.
“Testosterone levels show steady decrease among young US men” https://www.urologytimes.com/view/testosterone-levels-show-steady-decrease-among-young-us-men
That study doesn’t break down by race but how many ads, TV shows and movies have you seen with black ‘beta’ males? Perhaps I’ve missed it but I can’t recall any young black “Pajama boys”, only white, Asian and Indian males may apply.
Obviously, the rise of anti-male feminism (toxic masculinity) has played a part as well. Avoidance of the accusation of ‘racism’ prevents anti-male feminists from the attacking of black males.
BTW, “STUDY: Testosterone Treatment Turns Democrat Voters More Conservative.”
https://thenationalpulse.com/2022/05/18/ncreased-testosterone-levels-turns-voters-more-conservative/
‘Official’ rejection of the Sonnet is just another example of the meme’s acceptance.
As is the now widespread embrace of white women having children with black men. Notice the prevalence of interracial couples in TV ads, the great majority of which show white women with black men. White men are cuckolds not black men.
It’s about generational penance much more than racial acceptance. The proof of which is that a white man having children with a black woman is much less common, even in TV advertisements.
Sociologically, women marry ‘up’ and a white woman marrying a black man is in the aggregate, marrying down socioeconomically.
Economic prowess being a primary if subconscious determinate in the evaluation of a man’s ability to provide for a secure nest. Any male who dresses up as homeless will quickly discover how little interest women then show in him.
If Neo likes sonnets, she should also like a whimsical triolet written by Henry Austin Dobson (1840-1921), a nineteenth-century British essayist and poet who introduced some French forms (the rondeau and villanelle as well as the triolet) into English poetry. A triolet is a poem of only eight lines with the rhyme scheme ABaAabAB, where the capital letters represent lines repeated exactly. Here’s Dobson’s “Urceus Exit”– which invokes the sonnet:
I intended an Ode,
And it turn’d to a Sonnet
It began à la mode,
I intended an Ode;
But Rose cross’d the road
In her latest new bonnet;
I intended an Ode;
And it turn’d to a Sonnet.
Dobson was also having some academic fun with his Latin title: an urceus is a wide-mouthed water pot.
This university, and others like them, are engaging in Cultural Appropriation. They are appropriating the status, funding, and even the name ‘university’ from a tradition that is not theirs and that they reject.
Rufus T. Firefly, I asked my new neighbor, a melanin-rich family, where their little girl goes to school. A local classical academy! Wonderful!
That previous post (and the comments) mentioned above is as good as this one. Thank you all.
Sweet William’s Sonnet 29 is the ultimate sonnet for me. Every 5-10 years I remember how much I love it and work to memorize it. Alas, things don’t stick so well as they once did.
Here — not just a link — is the full meat and drink:
_____________________
Sonnet 29
When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man’s art and that man’s scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
(Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth) sings hymns at heaven’s gate;
. For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
. That then I scorn to change my state with kings.
–William Shakespeare
V. Williams: The Lark Ascending
Griffin @ 4:12 pm said: “The cowardice of university administrators never ceases to amaze.”
If the University Administrators are such cowards, then how do you think they’d react to a much bigger crowd of outraged normal people and deep-pocketed alumni righteously breathing fire down their neck for destroying our cultural heritage and history?
Right. They would fold and fall over like a cheap suit, except….It ain’t happening, is it? Not with the statues, not with the CRT, not with the sonnets. And therein lies the problem. A microphone-holding activist minority can trump a complacent uninspired unmotivated majority. All they need is access to the microphone, and a population of people unwilling to butt heads in defense of their beleifs.
Will they reject Limericks too?
Salford a school in Manchester,
has banned the Bard their ancestor,
For sonnets they see,
are fine misery,
and now they are quite the court jester.
When I was an aspiring young poet, Frank O’Hara was a god to me among modern American poets. Likely you haven’t heard of him and that’s OK, but take my word he was a Big Deal, bridging academics and avant-garde, painting and poetry, New York and the rest of America.
O’Hara was trained as a classical pianist, switched to poetry at Harvard, segued into a position as a curator at Museum of Modern Art in New York and became a fixture connecting everyone. He seemed to dash off the occasional poem here and there as a hobby.
All were astonished by the size and quality of his “Collected Poems” published after he died, hit by a dune buggy on Fire Island. (Yes, he was gay, very gay.)
He was deeply and sincerely mourned. He’s the only American poet I can think of who inspired an entire book of personal tributes: “Homage to Frank O’Hara.”
Here’s Patsy Southgate, a writer, poet and muse, on an intimate night she spent with O’Hara, sharing Sonnet 29:
___________________________
As Satie wound down, Frank and I fell to quoting lines of poetry to one another. I remember telling him that “When in Disgrace with Fortune and Men’s Eyes” had always been my favorite Shakespearean sonnet, and him saying it had always been his favorite too. We muffed our way through it together, ending triumphantly with:
“For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.”
–Patsy Southgate, “Homage to Frank O’Hara”
And next they will come for the ‘Haiku’.
Uneducated, uncivilized wretches.
A few hours ago I got off the phone with an old college friend who is now an adjunct professor teaching writing. He was complaining about the diktat from on high to implement a bright new shiny policy called the “labor-based grading system.”
That smelled suspicious to me, especially in our current Dark Age of Wokeness. Sure enough, I looked it up and discovered a foundational book on the practice:
–Asao B. Inoue, “Labor-Based Grading Contracts: Building Equity and Inclusion in the Compassionate Writing Classroom (Perspectives on Writing)”
https://www.amazon.com/Labor-Based-Grading-Contracts-Compassionate-Perspectives/dp/1607329255
Yep. Another Trojan Horse to smuggle in Da Woke.
Phillistines, is that the word?
Time flies like an arrow,
but fruit flies like a banana.
Just had to get that in there . .
Skilly…
I can hear the Bard laughing out loud all the way out here in West Wokestan…
He says you won the Internet today! thanks
Related:
The suicide of the West is, for some professors, a virtue…
You can’t make this up. (You’d probably never even think of trying…)
“CRT Symposium Speaker Calls Diversity of Thought ‘White Supremacist’ Excrement”—
https://redstate.com/alexparker/2022/05/19/report-crt-symposium-speaker-calls-diversity-of-thought-white-supremacist-excrement-n566711
And the bottom line? What kind of money are they making at the universities they wish to rip asunder? What might their investment portfolios look like? Where do they shop? And where do they send their kids to school?
Why do they even live in the accursed West to begin with?…
Pingback:Sonnets are racist says SalfordU « Samizdata
This essay, and the comments it evoked, have awakened in me a revived interest in poetry.
(I especially loved Neo’s sonnet about sonnets!)
“The God of Copybook Headings” was written about these malevolent clowns.
om It would be best, indeed great entertainment, if the gods of the copybook headings restricted their return to these clowns.
Unfortunately, these clowns expect the rest of us to be hit and they to be immune. Somehow.
I strongly, strongly recommend Arthur Koestler’s 1950 novel ‘The Age of Longing,’ which is basically about the West’s loss of cultural self-confidence. See my review: Sleeping with the Enemy
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11799.html
In the review, note especially the remark of a Comanche Indian college professor about his interaction with a white female student.
Pingback:Strange Daze: From Russia with Love
skilly,
Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.
At Salford sonnets are deemed too “white,”
And removed from curricula for spite.
Age old culprits are blamed for the schism,
Western culture and Imperialism,
Perhaps students simply are not bright.
@ Rufus > “Perhaps students simply are not bright.”
Send this one to the Babylon Bee!
I strongly suspect a LOT of the dilution in academic standards is not due so much the ideological claptrap, but is a cover for the situation: too many of the intelligent students are no longer prepared to address the Western Canon, and the others are not intelligent enough to understand it.
I see we have many poets here.
AesopFan,
In the ’80s I went to a typical, land grant University for my Undergrad, as did my wife. About two decades later I watched our kids matriculate through University. My kids are bright and pursue knowledge, yet, I definitely see holes in their general knowledge, things that were commonly known among college students 40 years ago and it’s worse among a lot of their peers. Our household incorporated a lot of classical knowledge and our kids attended private High Schools with traditional curricula.
I have witnessed the dumbing down, the coddling, first hand. Teachers apologize for assignments, grant extension upon extension…
@ david foster > thanks for the link to your review of Koestler’s book, although I found the subject very depressing.
I liked the observations in this comment by veryretired:
Also from david’s post, Michael Kennedy’s comment is even more relevant now, 12 years later – on two fronts.
The above was depressing; this is frightening – and standards for medical personnel have gone down since then.
I see no one has yet quoted “The Verse by the Side of the Road,” i.e. Burma Shave signs. Some were still around Pennsylvania roadways when I was a little kid. Two that I remember are:
Angels guard you
When you drive
But they retire
At 65
Burma Shave
He lit a match
To check gas tank
That’s why they call him
Skinless Frank
Burma Shave
My dad remembered an early 1945 set that read:
Let’s make Hitler
And Hirohito
Feel as bad
As ol’ Benito
Burma Shave
The interstates killed off almost all those signs, but there may still be a few left on back-country roads.
PA + Cat,
In Illinois, Missouri and Indiana I have seen burma shave type signs extolling the second amendment and gun rights in farmers’ fields that abut interstate highways.
I just did an internet search. Seems like this is the group responsible: https://www.gunssavelife.com/site-map/highway-sign-program/
PA Cat,
I posted a comment with a link to an organization in the Midwest that provides farmers with Burma shave type signs promoting the second amendment, but it looks like the spam filter doesn’t like the link. Likely due to the specific mention of a word that starts with “g” and rhymes with “fun.”
Regardless, I have seen their road signs in Interstates in the Midwest.
Looks like our fair proprietress has rescued my comment from the maws of the spam filter. Thanks, neo!
RTF–
I was able to follow the link, now that Neo retrieved it from the spam filter. Interesting project, that– I hope the woke crowd doesn’t vandalize the signs.
The Elon Musk toupee thread from May 11 resurfaced in my memory for some reason (possibly today’s mention of his mother), and that in turn reminded me of another Burma Shave roadside ad from my youth, this one containing a none-too-subtle hook for their product:
Within this vale
Of tears and sin,
Your head goes bald,
But not your chin.
Burma Shave
I’m making a list of words that are too white. Here are my results so far:
a
aardvark
and
as
at
….
As you can see, I’ve hardly started. Suggestions welcome.
What does it say about a culture that wants to remove the products of that culture because they are too representative of the elements that make up that culture? Nothing good.
I would also like to nominate Neo as Poet Laureate of the internet.
“What does it say about a culture that wants to remove the products of that culture because they are too representative of the elements that make up that culture? Nothing good.”
Change the people, change the culture. It was unreasonable to expect the majority of people who are unrelated to Shakespeare to value him, no matter how magnificent his contributions to literature. Only the cultured will take an interest in such things. The majority look for ethnic heroes, not cultural treasures far removed from their lives.
The sadder aspect is that those who are genuine inheritors of his and other related cultural productions will increasingly become alienated from their own inheritance. They are being shamed for being alive.
Sonnets are Us:
Shakespeare was valued for hundreds of years by “people unrelated to him”, all around the world actually. For example:
And then there’s this:
That was in 2016. Perhaps lower now?
It’s not hard to find links amplifying Shakespeare’s popularity in China, as neo’s quote mentions.
The Woke War on Western Civilization is tragic. That our universities support that war is outright betrayal. Young Wokesters have the excuse of youth and ignorance. Professors and administrators have no such defense.
There was a time when modern artists, writers and musicians were going their own way but by and large they respected the greats of the past. That was the point of my Frank O’Hara / Patsy Southgate story of their reciting Sonnet 29 together from memory (or doing their best) out of their love for Shakespeare.
huxley:
The vast majority of professors in the humanities – and increasingly in other disciplines – are now chosen specifically for their dedication to dismantling western culture. The foxes are guarding the university henhouse.