INVICTUS by William Ernest Henley

INVICTUS Out of the night that covers me,Black as the pit from pole to pole,I thank whatever gods may beFor my unconquerable soul. In the fell clutch of circumstanceI have not winced nor cried aloud.Under the bludgeonings of chanceMy head is bloody, but unbowed. Beyond this place of wrath and tearsLooms but the Horror of …

An Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Science

Percy passed an essay on to Daedalus for him to read, but first he gave the setting in which it was created. Percy told him that it was addressed to the United States in 1883, in reply to Thomas H. Huxley's “Science and Culture," delivered in Birmingham on October 1st, 1880. Huxley was known as …

Faustian Ethics

In Marlowe’s Faust we come to find a man that was in search after power and lust; a man who desired to be twenty for life, sleep with every woman, and have the power to do as he will. What we find in Goethe’s Faust is very different. Faust is a wise man, a polymath, …

A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body By Andrew Marvell

SOUL O who shall, from this dungeon, raise A soul enslav’d so many ways? With bolts of bones, that fetter’d stands In feet, and manacled in hands; Here blinded with an eye, and there Deaf with the drumming of an ear; A soul hung up, as ’twere, in chains Of nerves, and arteries, and veins; …

How the Greeks Invented Philosophy

“How did Greece become the first civilization to have the means to examine themselves?” asked Soren. “Where they lived had a huge impact on the invention of philosophy. They had to trade with foreign people, with armies much larger than themselves, with gods that gave a different logos. They were continually shown their way of …

The Pure Symmetry of the Ancient Greeks

Leonardo DaVinci's dying last words were, "I have offended God and mankind because my work did not reach the quality it should have." What he strived for his entire life, and believed never to be achieved, was the pure symmetry of the ancient Greeks.

Psychology and its Artistic Counterparts.

Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts, the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last. -JOHN RUSKIN The History of Venice, …

William Blake Unshackled

Romantic poet and painter William Blake (1757-1827). His Songs of Innocence and Experience were a contrast of the ordinary mechanistic world to the vibrant imaginative world which could see the world anew, perhaps even as it really is. He recognized man as struggling between the imaginative naivete' and the realism of what old age imposes …

The Lyrical Ballads: Wordsworth and Coleridge

The Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798, were a collection of poems collected and collaborated by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). This pair of writers made one feel and wonder in different ways. Coleridge would take the mysterious and wondrous, and bring them down to ordinary life. Wordsworth had the opposite effect, …