Home » Now a university in England has rejected the sonnet as too white and Western

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Now a university in England has rejected the sonnet as too white and Western — 56 Comments

  1. The cowardice of university administrators never ceases to amaze.

    We need new colleges and now.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. “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….

  7. A sonnet is just a sonnet. Conjuring racial characteristics to literary structures is a sign of severe mental illness.

  8. 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.

  9. As I’ve always said:
    ___________________

    A sonnet is only a sonnet.
    But a good lim’rick is a joke.

  10. Griffin,

    https://www.uaustin.org/

    “WE ARE DONE WAITING FOR THE LEGACY UNIVERSITIES TO RIGHT THEMSELVES. AND SO WE ARE BUILDING ANEW.”
    — PANO KANELOS, FOUNDING PRESIDENT OF UATX

    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.

  11. 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.

  12. 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?

  13. 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.

  14. Pingback:Poems, Everybody. The Lassie Reckons Herself A Poet – Musings from Brian J. Noggle

  15. 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.

  16. 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.

  17. 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.

  18. Rufus T. Firefly, I asked my new neighbor, a melanin-rich family, where their little girl goes to school. A local classical academy! Wonderful!

  19. That previous post (and the comments) mentioned above is as good as this one. Thank you all.

  20. 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

  21. 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.

  22. 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.

  23. 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”

  24. And next they will come for the ‘Haiku’.

    Uneducated, uncivilized wretches.

  25. 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.

  26. Time flies like an arrow,
    but fruit flies like a banana.

    Just had to get that in there . .

  27. 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

  28. 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?…

  29. Pingback:Sonnets are racist says SalfordU « Samizdata

  30. This essay, and the comments it evoked, have awakened in me a revived interest in poetry.

    (I especially loved Neo’s sonnet about sonnets!)

  31. “The God of Copybook Headings” was written about these malevolent clowns.

  32. 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.

  33. 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.

  34. Pingback:Strange Daze: From Russia with Love

  35. skilly,

    Outside of a dog a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog it’s too dark to read.

  36. 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.

  37. @ 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.

  38. 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…

  39. @ 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:

    In another context, I speculated that the seemingly bizarre alliance between the collectivist forces in the west and the islamic fascists was actually a mutually cynical attempt on both sides to use the others for their own purposes, while each group believed the other was expendable when the primary goal was achieved.

    And what is the primary goal? One that has not changed in several centuries—the destruction of the western cultural development of recognition for individual rights, and the concommitant proposition that political legitimacy was derived from the consent of the governed.

    Even now, after witnessing the collapse of several major empires in the face of this doctrine, and the hysterical, murderous responses of the collectivists during the 20th century, as they devised one form of totalitarianism after another in an attempt to defeat liberal, democratic society, we still do not clearly recognize how revolutionary such ideas are, nor do we understand the ferocity of the hatred that those threatened by the concepts of individual freedom and liberty hold for any and all who espouse such concepts, and are determined to live by them.

    The islamists are convinced that they can easily turn upon and defeat the secular statists who now ally with them when their common foe has been overthrown, and the statists clearly believe that they will be able to outsmart the foolish, religious fundamentalists, and control them in any future social construct.

    The dirty little secret, which both of these ideological allies are trying desperately to keep hidden, is that they are totally dependent on the forbearence of their mutual enemy—western, liberal, democratic, technological, scientific, capitalist, global society—for everything they have, and everything they do.

    It is not contamination by our alleged evil they truly fear, but any resolve on our part to simply deny them the very elements of our society that they claim to despise, but, in fact, could not survuve without. The products, the medical developments, the communications, the agricultural and inductrial techniques, and the information technology that now tie the various nations and cultures of the world together are beyond the capability of either the collectivist or islamist cultures.

    All they can do, at best, is copy whatever they can buy or steal. As with the imploded soviets, or partially discarded maoists in Asia, the social structure of the totalitarians is a house of cards resting on a foundation of sand. It stands only because we don’t simply blow it over.

    The continuous drumbeat of self-hatred being promulgated in our schools, disguised as education by people disguised as educators, is a part, a significant part, of the smokescreen blown up to obscure the very real advancement of the human race which has occurred since, and because of, the development of the principles of the empirical, rational, individualistic, liberal social organizations that have truly revolutionized human life on earth.

    By filling the minds of youth with the refuse of gramscian ideology, the termites hope to hollow out the living tree of western society, and cause its destruction.

    Preventing such a catastrophe is the worthy goal of any sane individual who realizes that the only result of the fall of western liberal democratic society will inevitably be a nightmare of slavery and destruction on a scale not seen since the dark ages.

    Light the lamp of the mind. It is the only true defense against the darkness.

  40. Also from david’s post, Michael Kennedy’s comment is even more relevant now, 12 years later – on two fronts.

    Very thoughtful. I have been distressed by the changes in my children’s education over the past 30 years. I have a son who will be 45 next month and a daughter who will be 20 in May. When he was a college freshman, he was excited to take an elective on the Athenian democracy. My youngest daughter took a course on American history that used a “whiteness studies” book as a textbook. I wonder if Athenian democracy is still an elective ?

    I think the worst has occurred in education. My first wife taught second grade in 1962 to 1965 when our first son was born. She loved it. The only really hard time she had was the day John Kennedy was shot. She had to explain to small children what happened. We were divorced 30 years ago but have stayed good friends. About 15 years ago. she was laid off from her job as a bank VP in a merger. She has a lifetime credential so she took a job as a long term temp teacher when Pete Wilson was trying to reduce class size in one of the interminable California school reforms. She taught third grade and was appalled at the changes in the teachers. They were unenthusiastic and would discuss the kids in the teachers’ room, often making fun of them. One day, she complimented a second grade teacher on what a good job she had done with reading. The woman burst into tears. No one had ever complimented her.

    The principal tried to get her to sign a contract but she got another bank job and left after about six months. She used to see him in the neighborhood market afterward and he would always come over to talk. He told her she was his best teacher !

    Personally, I think good teachers should make more money and administrators should be cut in half but it won’t happen as long as the union is in charge. When Schwartzenegger tried to get an initiative passed to require five years instead of two for tenure of elementary teachers, the union mortgaged their headquarters building in Sacramento and spent $50 million to defeat it. All four of his reform initiatives failed and he gave up. Now, he just mugs for TV.

    The above was depressing; this is frightening – and standards for medical personnel have gone down since then.

    The conversion of women medical students in UK (I was the one who posted that) is only part of the problem. Muslim women doctors and nurses will not expose their arms to scrub in surgery. The nosocomial infection rate in Britain is out of control.

  41. 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.

  42. 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.

  43. Looks like our fair proprietress has rescued my comment from the maws of the spam filter. Thanks, neo!

  44. 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

  45. 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.

  46. 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.

  47. “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.

  48. Sonnets are Us:

    Shakespeare was valued for hundreds of years by “people unrelated to him”, all around the world actually. For example:

    Shakespeare’s plays are performed more frequently in Germany than anywhere else in the world, not excluding his native England. The market for his work, both in English and in German translation, seems inexhaustible.” The German critic Ernst Osterkamp wrote: “Shakespeare’s importance to German literature cannot be compared with that of any other writer of the post-antiquity period. Neither Dante or Cervantes, neither Moliere or Ibsen have even approached his influence here. With the passage of time, Shakespeare has virtually become one of Germany’s national authors.”…

    The patronage of Catherine made Shakespeare an eminently respectable author in Russia, but his plays were rarely performed until the 19th century, and instead he was widely read…

    And then there’s this:

    Shakespeare is more popular and better understood in emerging economies such as Brazil, India, China, Mexico and Turkey than he is in the UK, a new report for the British Council suggests.

    A survey of 18,000 people in 15 countries reveals, for example, that 88% of surveyed Mexicans like Shakespeare, compared with only 59% of British people; 84% of Brazilians said they found him relevant to today’s world, compared with 57% in the UK; and 83% of Indians said they understood him, far more than the 58% of Britons.

    Overall, Shakespeare’s popularity abroad stands at 65%, compared with 59% in the UK.

    That was in 2016. Perhaps lower now?

  49. 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.

  50. 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.

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