Episode 268: “Best of” Series: An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 10-Epilogue

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast: Episode 268 Summary – “Best of” Series: An Experiment in Criticism, Ch. 10-Epilogue

Release Date: March 18, 2025

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Introduction

In Episode 268 of The Literary Life Podcast, host Angelina Stanford Thomas Banks presents a curated "Best of" episode, revisiting standout moments and listener favorites since the podcast's inception in 2019. Joined by experienced teachers Thomas Banks and lifelong reader Cindy Rollins, Angelina sets the stage for an enriching exploration of literary criticism and the art of reading.

Angelina Stanford [00:00]: "We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites."

Upcoming Events and Webinars

The trio delves into upcoming educational events hosted by House of Humane Letters, including a series of webinars and a major online conference focusing on language and meaning in literature.

Angelina Stanford [04:15]: "I will be giving a webinar, a 90-minute webinar on classical mythology and its influence on English poetry... describing how classical myth has influenced English poetry and affected it in any number of ways."

Cindy emphasizes the importance of understanding mythological contexts to fully appreciate classic literature, highlighting the connection between classical myths and their reinterpretations in English poetry.

Cindy Rollins [05:20]: "Literature is written in the soil of mythology, fairy tales, fables, legends, and Bible stories. And I cannot say that enough."

Chapter 10: Poetry

The core of the episode focuses on Chapter 10 from An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis, where the hosts discuss the challenges and misconceptions surrounding poetry.

Thomas Banks [21:37]: "Poetry is very problematic... even good readers aren't reading poetry as Lewis suggests they should."

Cindy references Northrop Frye, noting that poetry, narrative, and music were once intertwined in epic traditions but have since become highly specialized, making poetry less accessible to general readers.

Cindy Rollins [22:05]: "The epics were song. So you had narrative, poetry, and music all together. Over time, we've separated those things."

Angelina highlights Lewis's critique of modernist expectations that poetry should only express what its form uniquely allows, thereby limiting its expressive capacity.

Angelina Stanford [24:11]: "Why would a modernist critic want poetry to express what only poetry can express when that [...] canalizes into a very, very thin channel?"

Good vs. Bad Criticism

A significant portion of the discussion revolves around Lewis's distinction between constructive literary criticism and evaluative or "vigilant" criticism that seeks to judge and impose tastes.

Thomas Banks [07:28]: "Practice wins out over theory and philosophy because while understanding the theory behind virtuous actions enables one to speak about them, it is the practice of virtue that enables one to act virtuously."

Cindy and Thomas explore how Lewis advocates for criticism that assists readers in truly understanding and entering literary works, rather than critics who dictate what should or shouldn't be read based on changing fashions or personal biases.

Cindy Rollins [16:06]: "He talks about Westerns and sci-fi, that there can be quality [...] experiences in any of those genres."

Angelina shares her enthusiasm for non-evaluative criticism, praising George Lyman Kittredge for his ability to elucidate authors' intentions without imposing judgment.

Angelina Stanford [56:30]: "Good criticism is that which multiplies, safeguards, and prolongs those moments when a good reader is reading a good book."

Epilogue: The Purpose of Reading Literature

In the concluding segment, the hosts discuss Lewis's insights on why we engage with literature. The emphasis is on literature as a means to transcend our own perspectives, fostering empathy and a broader understanding of the human experience.

Cindy Rollins [81:06]: "Literature admits us to experiences other than our own."

Angelina poetically captures Lewis's vision of literature as a window or door to other realities, enabling readers to "imagine with other imaginations" and "feel with other hearts."

Angelina Stanford [86:37]: "Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors."

Thomas connects this to the concepts of humility versus hubris in reading, advocating for an open-minded approach that allows literature to expand one's worldview rather than merely affirm personal biases.

Thomas Banks [86:50]: "We come to the book either humbly or with hubris."

Final Thoughts

The episode wraps up with reflections on the importance of selecting good books that invite meaningful reading experiences and the role of guides—both critics and educators—in facilitating a deeper engagement with literature. The hosts encourage listeners to embrace literature as a transformative journey, enriched by the insights of knowledgeable critics who help navigate the complexities of great works.

Cindy Rollins [88:47]: "There are people that can help you overcome it. [...] it's like trying to read Greek if you don't know Greek. We need an interpreter. We need a translator."

Notable Quotes

1. Angelina Stanford [00:00]: "This is the Literary Life Podcast... how Stories Will Save the World."
2. Thomas Banks [21:37]: "Poetry is very problematic... even good readers aren't reading poetry as Lewis suggests they should."
3. Cindy Rollins [07:28]: "Practice wins out over theory and philosophy..."
4. Cindy Rollins [81:06]: "Literature admits us to experiences other than our own."
5. Angelina Stanford [86:37]: "Literature as Logos is a series of windows, even of doors."
6. Thomas Banks [86:50]: "We come to the book either humbly or with hubris."

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For more insightful discussions and resources, visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and MorningtimeForMoms.com. Subscribe, rate, and review The Literary Life Podcast on your preferred platform to stay updated with future episodes and events.

Transcript

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Cindy Rollins]

This is not just another book chat podcast. Lifelong reader Cindy Rollins joins teachers Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks for an ongoing conversation about the skill and art of reading. Well, explore the lost intellectual tradition and discover how to fully enter into the great works of literature. Learn what books mean while delighting in the sheer joy of imagination. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen, and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Join us for an ever unfolding discussion of how stories will save the world. This is the Literary Life Podcast. Hello and welcome back to the Literary Life Podcast. And I am Angelina Stanford joined with me. Always the blonde bombshell herself, please, a Farrah Fawcett of education.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, my goodness. You never know what's coming out of her mouth.

[Cindy Rollins]

Sydney Rollins.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yay.

[Thomas Banks]

Here I am.

[Cindy Rollins]

I always want to introduce you like this is a baseball game. And batting fourth at cleanup is Cindy Rollins.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't want to talk about baseball right now because we lost last night. But anyway, go ahead. Who else is here? Is it just me?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no. We also have a pinch hitter today. Just to keep our baseball metaphor going, we've got the one and only everybody's favorite poet and classicist, or at least my favorite poet in classicist, Thomas Banks. Welcome, Thomas.

[Angelina Stanford]

Good to be here.

[Thomas Banks]

He was terrified after the blonde.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think his face was really. He was terrified at how I might introduce him.

[Angelina Stanford]

I know. How does one live up to that?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I didn't call you the blonde bombshell.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that's true.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, all right. So we're back. And Cindy, you just got back from California.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Oh, my beautiful weather. I mean, I've thought about this. I talk about the weather a lot and I'm going to claim that there's something intellectual about that. The weather is not a passing thing of uninterest. It's actually deeply important.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, I actually agree with that. We don't want to, like, rabbit trail into this, but I think observing patterns in nature is important.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly. That's nature study.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm being true, especially because there's so much patterns of season really plays into a Lot of literature and poetry and.

[Thomas Banks]

And yeah, you're paying attention and that's all part of it.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right. And you are supposed to be reflecting on what it means because in poetry the seasons always are metaphors for the stages of your life and you are supposed to be thinking through that every year. Right. You go from the spring when you're young and newborn birth, and then the summer of your life and then the autumn of your life and then the winter of your life. And there's many, many poems that use that metaphor. So I actually think it's important I reflect on my life as we go through the seasons. Not quite yet in the winter, but nor am I in the summer.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. And I'm definitely thinking I'm in the autumn. So, yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Anyway, I'm hoping I have an Indian summer for a while.

[Thomas Banks]

Right now we are having Indian summer and I don't think it's very pleasant. So I'm ready to go full out autumn.

[Cindy Rollins]

But anyway, we're in the hot flash of the season. I just couldn't resist. Couldn't resist. On that happy note, Mr. Banks, would you like to tell us what you've got going on? You've got something really exciting going on.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, thank you very much. I will be giving a webinar, a 90 minute webinar on classical mythology and its influence on English poetry. So I'll be describing some great English poetry by Shakespeare, Shelley, Alden, Tennyson and Shelley. Sorry, I said Shelley, Keats and Tennyson. And describing how classical myth has affected it, how classical myth has entered into the common subject matter of English poetry and affected it in any number of ways.

[Cindy Rollins]

And if you missed his last poetry webinar, the one on Introduction to the Fundamentals of Poetry, we have that for sale in our website store, so you can pick that up if you missed it because you don't want to miss any of this. I am so excited about this topic because of course I've observed that the mythological figures you meet in English poetry are not always the same way that you meet them in Greek mythology. We've got a little change there and I think it's important to identify that and see that.

[Thomas Banks]

And that's why stories are so important for young children, because you're laying the foundation to understand a lot of these things 100%.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I cannot say this enough. Right. It's not reading adaptations of great works that children need. They need to grow up in the same soil that the great works are written in. And they're written in the soil of mythology, fairy tales, fables, legends, and Bible stories. And I cannot say that enough. Cannot say it enough. And, you know, we didn't do this on purpose. This was just an idea that Tom came up with quite some time ago. But you, Sydney, pointed out to us that quite a few people following the Ambleside online curriculum are reading the myth of Icarus right, this semester.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, they are, because of the painting by who is it my brain?

[Angelina Stanford]

Bruegel.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes, Brueghel, which I cannot pronounce the Dutch way. But, Thomas, you did a very good job with that. That's why I don't remember it. But yes. So that painting is fascinating. And so.

[Cindy Rollins]

And of course, Auden wrote a poem about that painting and that myth, right?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So the poem is one of the ones I'll be discussing at length. The poem is Musee de Beaux Arts. And I think Alden wrote that after visiting the painting in Brussels or wherever in Belgium it is now. And, yeah, just. It was a painting he admired. And, yeah, I love both the painting and the poem, and I'm looking forward to talking about him.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I'm gonna just, you know, I'm gonna tread gently here because I give the non poetic spiel here. It's relevant. We've got the relevant webinar.

[Thomas Banks]

What, no utility on this podcast?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, you're right. No utility at all. None at all. I'm really excited about that. But I'm also excited about Mr. Banks joining us for this last episode on Experiment and Criticism.

[Thomas Banks]

And of course, we had to have him because the first chapter we're going to cover is called Poetry.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I'm just going to snooze out for this section and let him take over. But before we get to that, Cindy, do you have a commonplace quote to share with us this week?

[Thomas Banks]

I did, and I worked really hard to get a short one because I have long ones. But I do have a little comment to make about this. So this is by Kevin Bost. It's from the book the Porch and the Cross, which is a book about the Stoics and Christian philosophy and how they overlap a little bit. But he says practice wins out over theory and philosophy because while understanding the theory behind virtuous actions enables one to speak about them, it is the practice of virtue that enables one to act virtuously. And I would add also, and I think Kevin Faust would add this later in the book also, you know, we practice virtue when, by the power of the Holy Spirit, not just our own, pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps, but it's good for us to have a picture of virtue. But the reason I picked this quote, besides the fact that so often we hear people talk about virtue and how you're supposed to read literature for virtue, and yet it doesn't seem to have that effect very often. And the more someone talks about virtue, often, the less you. You actually see virtue.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen to that.

[Thomas Banks]

We're so fallen. But one of the things that fascinated me about this book and why I'm intrigued by it is that I keep hearing Charlotte Mason in these readings of the Stoics. And that's taken me quite by surprise. I didn't go to the Stoics to find Charlotte Mason, but I have found her there. David Hicks, years ago, had told me, I had once said that Charlotte Mason teaches us to accept or reject initial ideas. And he said, oh, that's a Stoic concept. And, you know, I knew it from Charlotte Mason, and I kind of kept that in the back of my head. But now as I'm going back and reading some of the Stoics, some of their works, I'm like. I'm like, Charlotte Mason was all over this stuff.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is really fascinating.

[Thomas Banks]

I know. It's so much fun.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is really fun. And I love the quote. I completely agree. This is another one of my little soapbox issues, is that. And Lewis actually talks about this in the chapters we're covering today. That when we talk about literature being good, I think we make the mistake of thinking that it makes us good.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

The goodness in truth, beauty and goodness is not that we are being made good. It doesn't work. I mean, you can read Bible stories all day long. That's not gonna make your child good. Right. That there's an internal mystery that's gonna have to happen there that you can't force. And all too often, I think that what we're looking for in literature is a shortcut. I get letters like this all the time. I know you do, too. Tell me what book to read, my child. To make him obey me or stop lying or work harder and stop being lazy. I just think if your kid is reading the prov and doesn't stop being lazy, there's no fairy tale I can recommend that it's gonna cure that.

[Thomas Banks]

Right? Right. Yeah. I definitely think in the literature, when it does work like that, it's a. It's a mystery. It's not something we manufacture. And we'll. This will cut. We'll cover some of this in the. In the. As we go through today. So I don't want to get off on a rabbit trail, but I do think this had a lot to do with what Lewis was saying.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, I think. I think all of this. It was very easy to find quotes that I thought fit. I know because I just. Oh, I love the vision he's getting here. Anyway, Mr. Banks, do you have a commonplace quote for us? I know you do.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, I do. So I came across this one. I was going through my commonplace book just a few minutes ago. Francis Bacon, from one of his essays, he says, men in great place are thrice servants, servants of the sovereign or state, servants of fame and servants of business. And I guess that is one of those that makes one reflect that there are blessings not to being a person in great place, that one is not the servant of fame or the servant of state or the servant of, you know, the business on which many lives depend or one's own well being.

[Cindy Rollins]

Certainly, you know, that's such an ancient idea too, that to be in a place of authority means to be a servant. And we do not accept, we still give lip service to it. We talk about our politicians being public servants, but we all roll our eyes. Right. We all know.

[Angelina Stanford]

Really believes that.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And it shows the dangers of all that. You do have to wrestle with those things. So you have to be an extraordinary person to wrestle with. The fact that if you, you know, are in a place of authority, you have your spheres. The sphere you operate in is scary. Kind of almost.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's kind of poignant considering Francis Bacon's own career too, because Francis Bacon was a judge. I mean, he'd be like what we call a Supreme Court justice in his own day under Queen Elizabeth and King James. And it came back to bite him because eventually he was. Eventually, I think he was arraigned for accepting bribes or something like that, that it turned out he didn't actually know he was accepting. And anyway, yeah, ruined his career. And he spent the rest of his life confined to his, you know, country estate, sort of under, you know, not exactly house arrest, but basically told not to come near the Capitol on threat of his life. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Oh, wow. I had no idea.

[Angelina Stanford]

Kind of, you know, wow. Kind of.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So many of those people in Elizabethan times, it was so treacherous. One minute you're on the good side and the next the bad.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's. It's almost like the risk of death was an accepted premise for entering into politics. You know, you might get ahead and.

[Cindy Rollins]

Any kind of public life, honestly. Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

And no wonder there was so Much intrigue if you. There's intrigue anyway, but at the threat of death.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, it's like Lewis says so beautifully in this section of reading. Right. The use of the guillotine is addictive.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was great. I love that. All right, so mine. My quote goes a completely opposite direction of Frances Bacon under house arrest. I'm quoting from Madeleine Lingle in her memoir, which I love. A circle of quiet. I love all of her nonfiction stuff. A circle of quiet walking on water. She speaks my language, and I just adore her. Anyway, so this is her quote. Art is not a mirror, but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and patterns. Not the structure of conformity which imprisons, but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings. I've been reading this book about the evolution of the literary night, and one of the things it talks about is the difference between literature and history, is that literature deliberately tries to shape the past into a meaningful pattern, which I completely agree with. And quote here is, too, that. That literature is trying to show us the structure and pattern of meaning of life. And then she gets right at what Lewis is saying, too. So that we grow as human beings.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. And I love that she makes her point so simply. It's not a mirror, but an icon.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm. And. And. And Lewis is getting at so many of the same ideas. When he says we have to stop meeting ourselves in books, that's a mirror. Right. Stop trying to find the mirror reflection. Try to get past that. He ends the book with his saying, you know, we have to transcend ourselves. And that's one of the reasons behind. It's not just like, oh, well, we're literary and they're unliterary. I mean, his whole point is that the unliterary way of reading will stunt your growth as a human being.

[Thomas Banks]

I love, as we get into this, and I did want to lay this foundation, how unsnobby Lewis is. He's not trying to be a snob. He's genuinely trying to address a problem.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, completely. And I think if you. If you take the time to get all of the references he's making, he's making a lot. I mean, he's talking about King Solomon's minds and Tarzan and.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's trying to say that there's. It's not all highbrow stuff. He's saying. He talks about Westerns and sci fi, that there can be quality and good reading experience. Experiences in any of those genres.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, absolutely. And I wanted to lay that out because this is not a. As a matter of fact, there's my word again that I love so much. And he uses it later on in this.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, he does. I even wrote, I knew you were going for it. I marked it on Origins.

[Thomas Banks]

It's dangerous for us to be debunkers. And he's. What he's saying is, I'm not debunking readers who are trying to read. I am debunking a certain class of people who would. Who would make reading something that is not something altogether different.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And he's debunking the type of critic who tries to shape your taste.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

As you should be ashamed that you like westerns. You should be ashamed that you like sci fi.

[Angelina Stanford]

One of my favorite lines in the. It's one of the later chapters. He says the best way to lead a student to better things is not to, you know, is not to berate his present taste, but simply to show him, you know, what else is out there, what else the landscape offers. And I think that's just definitely wisdom in that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. Well, no, you can't tell someone. They. It's like telling somebody. Calm down. Like saying you have bad taste. That doesn't work.

[Thomas Banks]

And they might not, is what Lewis is saying. They might. You know, they. They might not have bad taste. The book itself might not be all that bad.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I love it. I love it. So he starts off here in chapter. Well, I guess we should start with chapter 10.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, we need to go with chapter 10.

[Cindy Rollins]

But the principle that he gives is that this is not a book about what book should you read. This is a book about how to read any book. What is the literary way to read. And I love his definition. Good books, then, are those that you can read well. Bad books are those which you cannot read well. And so you have to beware the lists. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm going to briefly interrupt this best.

[D]

Of episode because it was recorded many years ago. And I want to let you know what's going on right now in 2025 at the house of Humane Letters.

[Cindy Rollins]

If we had a word of the.

[D]

Year, it would be word. It turns out that so much of what we're struggling right now in the world of education and even in our culture at large, this experience we're having that some have called a crisis of meaning. Well, it turns out that the reason we can't figure out how things mean is because we don't understand language. Language and words is really at the heart of our entire struggle right now for meaning. We have put together a number of webinars, mini classes, and even a whole conference this year devoted to exploring this topic. How does language work? How is meaning made? And why does any of this matter? So right now, Jen Rogers is still in the middle of her mini class on the language and literary theory of the Inklings. This is a once a week class, so it's not too late to jump in, view the recordings and catch up. Even if you're listening to this much after the fact, you're going to want to get these videos. Honestly, this class is blowing our mind. And what seemed like it might be a very esoteric topic has turned out to be incredibly practical as again, we are learning how things mean and why does it even matter? Next month in March, we have another webinar on the same topic, but this time applied to the language of nature. So we have a WEBINAR Coming up March 19th called the Living Learning to Read the Language of Nature. And this will also be exploring how things mean and how do we know what they mean? And why does it matter? And then finally, in April, we'll be culminating with a conference on exactly this topic. The seventh annual Literary Life Online conference is going to be about living language, why words matter. I'll be speaking, Jen Rogers will be speaking, Dr. Phillips will be speaking, Mr. Banks will be speaking. And I'm very, very excited to introduce to our audience a philologist of whom I am a great admirer, Dr. Michael Drought. And we will each be giving talks approaching this question, how does language mean and why words matter? As I said, I am more and more convinced that at the heart of all of the things that we are struggling with right now, this crisis of meaning really comes down to a crisis of language. And we're not going to be able to find our way out of this crisis unless we get to the bottom of exactly where we went wrong and find out what words mean, how meaning is made, and why any of this matters. I hope to see you at some of these events and you can find out about ticket [e-mail] and now back to our.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, well, let's go ahead then and start with chapter 10, poetry.

[Thomas Banks]

All right, so he right away starts talking about the. I mean, poetry is very problematic, right? So I mean, immediately we see that because not only is poetry is actually fallen by the wayside for everyone at this point in time. And, and I would say in our day, even more, even good readers aren't Reading poetry is what he's saying, right? Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I'm very curious what Mr. Banks has to say about this chapter. My big takeaway from it was some things that he says that some of my favorite scholars talk about too. Northrop Fry says the exact same thing that, you know, essentially, poetry, narrative and music were initially one thing, right? The epics.

[Thomas Banks]

That's my favorite quote. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

So the epics were song. So you had a narrative, you had poetry, and you had music all together. Over time, we've separated those things. Things. So that now poetry has become such a specialized thing that it really only exists for other poets. Northrop Frye talks about that, and I was so pleased to see CS Lewis saying the same thing. He says if you. If it takes. If it's such a specialized skill to read poetry that only other poets can read it, we can't then be upset that no one's reading it. Thomas, what did you think about that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I guess my conclusions were similar. And I think he makes a good point about. He seems to call into question the idea that poetry ought to be written in such a way that it expresses only what poetry can express. Because once that admission is made, then a huge part of the traditional subject matter of poetry, of, you know, what we've understood poetry to be capable of since. Since Homer. The Book of Job, wherever you put your starting date is simply taken away because, like he says, you could. Homer could. If he had wanted to have told the story of the Odyssey or of the Iliad in prose, he wouldn't have had to use verse. It wouldn't have been as good, probably, but he could have done it. So. But why would. Why would a modernist critic. Why would a. A Levis science critic want poetry to express what only poetry can express when that. When that necessarily canalizes into a very, very thin channel? I think it's damaging and limiting in a very, very unhealthy way. And I think he's right to. He's right to bring that up.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, I completely agree with that. And I like how he talks about that. Even people who are reading the poetry, that it's extremely difficult to read it in a literary way. Right. So there he says they. Most people are just avoiding it altogether. And if they are reading it, then they're probably reading it for the moral right. I mean, like, we all know the horrifically bad poetry inside a Hallmark card. You know, like, it's just. It's for the. If it's for the moral right he brings up.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's Right on the first page. He says, for the unliterary, hardly read poetry at all. A few here and there. And then he says mostly old women may embarrass us by repeating the verses of Ella Wheeler Wilcox or Patience Strong. And I've never heard of Patience Strong, but I think in. You see Ella Wheeler Wilcox in a lot of old hymnals. Yeah, I think. Yeah. People or. Who's the other one? Fanny Crosby.

[Thomas Banks]

We did memorize one of her poems. I think it was Laugh and the world laughs with you, weep and you weep alone.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

That sort of thing must borrow its mirth. I'm kind of like those old ladies because, you know, those were the kind of poems we did memorize when I first started with my kids. So we memorize. Laugh and the world laughs with you weep and you weep alone for the sad old earth must borrow its mirth has trouble enough of its own. It's not the worst poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, no. I'm impressed that you know that one.

[Cindy Rollins]

I didn't know it was a real poem.

[Angelina Stanford]

I don't know if the. You remember William Bennett's Book of Virtues?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yes, I do remember that there.

[Angelina Stanford]

Were some of Ella Wheeler Wilcox's poems in there, because that's what I associate her name with anyway.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Yes. And it is that kind of moral tale in a poem kind of thing. And some are not the worst poetry, but later. And some are terrible, but I could believe that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. One thing that was interesting to me about this chapter was that Lewis says at the beginning that these days you do not find unliterary people, for the most part, who enjoy poetry. And. But even that seems to be kind of delivered with a word of caution, because that doesn't necessarily mean that the best reading that is done is the reading of poetry. It's almost like. It almost seems like if there's a genre or a form which doesn't attract a certain number of unliterary people, then there might be something wrong with it or unhealthy about it. Maybe it's too. It's been refined out of. Out of a state of, you know, creative health or something like that. That seemed to me to be an implication of what he was saying, though he doesn't necessarily say it. He's pretty measured in his. In his judgments all throughout this, which is another thing I really like.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So we don't want to draw the line tighter. But also we have our own experience where, you know. You know, it's interesting about reading poetry because it is an art. And I Think I learned that art. And I don't think I have it down because it's completely been by reading poetry. So. But when you hear someone. Now when I hear poetry read badly, it really grates on me. And it's not that I don't want to be a snob about that, it's just that it's. Does it does matter how poetry sounds?

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, absolutely. He says that? Yeah, he says the unliterary reading of poetry doesn't take into account the sound. He absolutely says that.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he also brings to bear the fact that certain fellow workers of his fellow professors had remarked to him that he quotes one of them. He says a colleague once said in my hearing that whatever matters in poetry, the sound doesn't.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It's like you're paid to teach this and yet you think that, you know, one of its primary faculties is of no matter whatsoever. That's mind boggling.

[Thomas Banks]

It is, as a matter of fact. If the sound doesn't matter, what matters in poetry? I mean, what is it? But it's sound besides the. I mean, I know it has meaning and metaphor, but all of that wrapped up in the way it sounds, or else it would. I don't think it would be prose. Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And reading out loud is a form of interpretation. And so if someone's reading it badly, then they're interpreting it badly.

[Angelina Stanford]

And actually some of his thoughts on. I mean, Lewis, of course, didn't work with, you know, young children in his own. His own profession, but he says that. I thought this was perceptive of him where he remarks that when young children first learn to read poetry, they. They will emphasize the rhythm of it very, very deliberately. And he says that's not a problem because that's something they'll just outgrow naturally. That's the equivalent of them learning to walk. And when you learn to walk, you naturally stumble. So correcting a child for being sing songy, a young child for being sing songy when he or she is reciting a poem, that's not something you should worry about at all. And actually I thought that was wonderful advice.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I'm sort of the child when it comes to poetry. Sorry, Angelina.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, no, go right.

[Thomas Banks]

Because I will. When I'm struggling to get a poem in my head, I will turn it back into a sing songy thing. And then once I have that, I can let go of it and I've got it. I've got it in me and I can say it the way it's supposed to be said or hear it the way it's supposed to be heard. But I sometimes have to go back to like my ABCs and just do it in a very old kind of rhymey way just to get a hold of it. And then I can let go of that, I think.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so I was reading this article the other day about iambic pentameter, and that part of the reason why Shakespeare wrote in iambic pentameter is because it's much easier to memorize long speeches if they're in poetry. So I think that the sing songiness of kids could also make it a lot easier for them to memorize it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, that's so true.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right, so let's wrap that up and move on to my favorite chapter, chapter 11, where he says, oh, I got. I got. This is my hill to die on right here, ladies and gentlemen. That he says, okay, so let's get to it. I've tried to make my case here that good literature is that which can be read well and bad books are those which cannot be read well. And he restates that the focus of this book is on the act of reading, which I just love that. But he also says something on the first page of this chapter, which came up on the Literary Life discussion group and inevitably comes up. Anytime I talk about literature and surrendering yourself to the art and fully entering it, someone will inevitably ask, but, but why would you? Isn't there a danger to opening yourself up to a bad book? By which they mean a corrupting book?

[Thomas Banks]

Right, right.

[Cindy Rollins]

And Lewis has an answer to that. He has a couple of different answers. First of all, he says that books don't corrupt in the way that you think they do. They're not as dangerous as you think they are, and that, you know, in other words, no Catholic is going to read Pilgrim's Progress and be a Puritan at the end of it. No Puritan is going to read Dante and be a Catholic at the end of it. That's not the way it works. You can enter fully into things you disagree with and come out a better person, a fuller human being for having experienced another perspective. But it's not going to change your fundamental beliefs that that's not the way it works.

[Thomas Banks]

I think that is one of the main points of literature is to get us outside of ourselves and not be. We're not hunkered down inside like Gollum. We are outside. And literature can do that for us. It can take us out of our head and show us the things we know in a different light.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I Think it, you know, having other experiences also helps you to be more empathetic and have a better understanding of people that you don't agree with. But another worry that people have with these so called corrupting books. Okay. And I think that Lewis does address this on the first page. So if you're worried that something is pornographic, for example, Lewis is absolutely not talking about that. He specifically says not every book deserves to be read. It's perfectly okay to say, from what I understand, this is a corrupting book and I don't want to read it. I mean, I feel that way about many books. My roommate in college was in love with American Psycho by Brett Easton Ellis. And I would not touch that thing with a 10 foot pole. I said, there's no way I want to see life through the eyes of a crazy serial killer. Like, I just didn't think that that was personally going to be good for me. That was. So that was an experience that I did not choose to open myself up to. Lewis says, that's okay, you don't have to read every book. He says, but if you read it, you have to read it the right way. You have to give it a fair shake. So using that standard, it was perfectly okay for me to say to my roommate, no, I'm not interested in reading it, thanks. But what would have been wrong is for me to read it to prove how bad it was.

[Thomas Banks]

Right? Right. And that is where the whole idea of reading critically comes into play.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. I can't read it just to debunk it.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. And that's what happens all the time. People approach a book with the criticism as a critic in a critical way. Just all the manifestations of that word and they're not there, they have immediately disqualified themselves.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right? Right. So if I chose to read that book, I was gonna have to lay myself open to it and really hear it and really try to see what she liked in it in order to give it a fair shake. That's Lewis's point. But he also says, but you also don't have to do that. You also don't have to touch the book at all. That you know, you free to walk away from it. So he's not saying, open yourself up to every possible corrupting force. He's saying, if you make the choice to read a book, you got to read it the right way, otherwise you're not giving it a fair shake.

[Thomas Banks]

And then that's when he brings in the idea of who's popular and who's not. And people go out of fashion so if this week, you know, Lamb is out of fashion, and he. And he generally is, then we can't go and read him just because we're trying to prove that, yes, everybody's right, he's terrible because we kind of can prove that about anybody, really. If Lewis goes out of fashion or he mentioned Chesterton, it's not that hard to tear things apart. It's quite easy, really. It's much harder to love something because to approach something with love. I think I.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, he mentions Chesterton and as you said, and it's funny, but he's writing this in 1960 or thereabouts, and which would have been. I think that would have been about 20 years after Chesterton's death. There was a period following Chesterton's death where pretty much everything he wrote went out of print.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which is hard to imagine now because, I mean, it seems like you can't throw a stone without hitting someone who likes Chesterton especially. And, you know, if you work in classical education. So, I mean, yeah, it's kind of. I guess we're sort of in a Chesterton moment again. But, yeah, when Lewis was writing, he was kind of kind of forgotten. And he mentions. He mentions fashionable dislike of Milton. And there was also, like, T.S. eliot wrote a couple of pretty strongly worded essays against Milton and trying to show him up. And so, yeah, Lewis was very much about, throughout his career, you know, standing up for the. Standing up for whatever classic was being neglected, or not even classic, but whatever good was being neglected. So, yeah, he was kind of a knight for the underdog, which is a nice thing to be, I think.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's right. In literary fashions, like he says, you know, whoever's in style this month will be out next month. They come and go. And Shakespeare was out of style for a few hundred years. So we have to remember that and try really hard not to get caught up in the fashions of the moment. But in the rest of this chapter, and this is my favorite part, he talks about what is good criticism. So now he's going to really get into the nitty gritty of what is the difference between the good criticism, the bad critic. Because he's really not painting with a wide brush. He's not saying, oh, we never read what somebody wrote about a book. He's being very specific. And before we get into that, which is my 100% hill to die on, Mr. Banks, you found out something very interesting about the context of what Lewis is talking about. Can you tell us about that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So at the end of this last chapter, he says, he describes a certain type of critical mindset as being the. The mindset of eternal vigilance. The. I think he says, the vigilant critics, those who are always sort of on the ki. Vive. On guard against letting. Letting anything into the purview of their own enjoyments, which is not, you know, among the truly great. So I think he had in mind. I did some reading. And he had in mind a fellow professor at Cambridge named FR Leavis, who wrote Levis, wrote a. What was then an influential book called the Great Tradition. He wrote that in 1948.

[Cindy Rollins]

Which Lewis mentions in this book.

[Angelina Stanford]

Which Lewis mentions. Yes, exactly so. And FR Leavis was very much the kind of guy who spent his life, I guess you could say, he dedicated his work to drawing very firm lines around where the canon ended, sort of delimiting the canon, what belongs in it, what didn't. And he was. He was very much a hanging judge, type of literary academic. And he says, for instance, somewhere, the point of reading Fielding. The point of reading Fielding, you know, Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, is so that we can learn to read Jane Austen more intelligently. And once we have learned to read Jane Austen intelligently, we can have done with Fielding. So not used.

[Cindy Rollins]

Not see.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, very much so. Yeah. So he says, basically. So the great tradition. He decides at the end, the great novelists in the English language are. I think he decides. Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, D.H. lawrence. And everything else is.

[Thomas Banks]

And they all fall in a very narrow band of time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, That's. Yeah, basically one century, I guess. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

Because you grew up into them. You read Shakespeare to grow into.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sure. And, yeah. Everything else is basically teaching you how to read these, you know, this small handful of authors more intelligently and, you know, just sort of paying your. Paying your time.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is utterly fascinating. And you told me that there was also some personal. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah, yeah. And Levis did not like Lewis at all. I don't know that they knew each other well personally. But Levis, from what I've read about him, was the kind of man who basically took disagreement on a intellectual question as an expression of personal dislike. So if you disagree with me, you must hate me. So you are my enemy. That's Leavis right there. And when Lewis died in 1963, the very next day Levis walked into class with notice of Lewis's death and said, the Times Literary Supplement says that we will miss him, but, gentlemen, I assure you we will not. Oh, he was like, yeah, he Carried. He did not bury a hatchet. I guess.

[Cindy Rollins]

See, this is the thing everybody imagines that literary critics are in some ivory tower, all getting along. No, it is. It's a soap opera. The drama, the frenemies. It's all there.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, if you read the book the Inklings by the. What is it? Zaleskis.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. The Fellowship of the Inklings.

[Thomas Banks]

And it's about the four writers, Barfield, Lewis, Tolkien, and Williams. Williams. It's amazing. They all were embroiled in controversy as over ideas along their life. Some very, you know, some were controversy among controversy. And it kind of makes you feel like, well, that's what happens when ideas are out there. People, you know, split hairs and eventually, well, there's that.

[Cindy Rollins]

But then also in the academy, there's always a tension between the avant garde and those that want to preserve the tradition. And Lewis and Tolkien, et al, were definitely on the side of preserving tradition. And they're always going to be looked down upon as those who want that, you know, want to be tastemakers. So one thing I do want to say is that, you know, it may be a little bit confusing to our listeners. So we got to. It is definitely incumbent on me to define some terms here. Lewis has been bashing critics, and yet everyone who listens to me knows I have my favorite critics. Lewis, Tillard, Northrop Fry. I have my people that I quote all the time, Harold Goddard. And so, you know, what. What's the deal with that? Well, I think Lewis in this section tells us what the deal is with that, and he begins to distinguish between the types of critics that he says don't help us and the kinds that do help us. And so the. The guy who wrote the great tradition that Mr. Banks just talked about was an example of someone who does not help. And pretty much everybody in the does not help category for Lewis is what he calls evaluative critics. In other words, anybody who is saying, this book is valuable, this one is not valuable, do read this, don't read that. The one who is putting himself in a position of judge, the one who wants to be the tastemaker, this is what everyone should be reading, that. That's the guy who doesn't help. He says, honestly, it tells you nothing when these guys recommend something because you don't know on what basis they're judging these books.

[Thomas Banks]

And he comes back later and talks about things that help us help us when we, you know, how do we approach a book? And he does list some things later on. We can get into that later.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I have them all written down in examples. Because I. This is, this is my favorite. This is my favorite part. What is good criticism. But that starts on page 119. Is there anything you wanted to mention before I jump into that? I mean, he talks about why it's ridiculous to try to be a taste maker because tastes change and it's all a passing fashion.

[Thomas Banks]

He does say, I want to convince people that adverse judgments are always the most hazardous because I believe this is the truth. And I've known some people who were very good at. I have friends who I read a lot and I like to put up my reviews on Goodreads. And usually if I don't like a book that everybody else likes, I just, I say it as my personal opinion. I'm not, I don't. I try not to pass judgment on the book itself, but I have friends who only write reviews if they're good reviews. And, And I think that's kind of an interesting way to go about it. And I could see why they do that. I think it's. It's. You can trust yourself when you have a good. A good review more so than a bad review.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's true. But, you know, sometimes the bad reviews on Amazon actually help me because when you explain why you didn't like book, it might be for exactly why I do like a book.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, that's true.

[Cindy Rollins]

So as long as you give. If you're giving your reasons, then I can handle it. But just this whole, like, putting out the list, you know, These are the 10 books you must read this year. Like, all we have is those kinds of lists. And they don't. They don't really tell us anything. This is the. This is the must read. These are the must watches. This is what the critics like. But tell me why the critics like it. You know, I once had a conversation with someone where I was saying a TV show I liked, and he came back and said, oh, yes, the critics like that show. And I thought, well, this is.

[Angelina Stanford]

That.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's neither here nor wow. That has nothing to do with my. Why do the critics like it? Why do I like it? That's. That's not relevant. But it was like, as far as he was concerned, my liking this television show got the thumbs up because critics also liked it.

[Angelina Stanford]

It.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I guess if critics didn't like it, then I was wrong for liking it.

[Thomas Banks]

And I guess this. He has this one passage that is why I am so skeptical of critics. But he says the critics assume that the use of English common in their own set, a use which is really very esoteric, not always very convenient, and always in rapid change, is common to all men. They take their own narrow ideas and try to impose it on everybody around them as if they were some tastemaker. But they don't have a large enough view of the world to do that. And I see that so much, it grates on me.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, anytime you're talking about a specialized field, there's the tendency to become disconnected from reality inward.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that is true of literary critics, that's true of educators. I mean, honestly, I see that every time I go into the school, they're so out of touch with reality because they're so in tune with their own school culture. And that means that can happen in your family. That can happen anywhere. You have to make a real effort to see beyond your own fence.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, yeah, that is one of my points in my talk that I just gave at Wild and Free about raising the freeborn. A freeborn person is someone who can get outside of themselves, which I've already said in this podcast, but it fits. Every. The whole time I'm reading the chapter, I'm thinking, yes, in order to be free, you have to step outside of yourself. In a way, you're a prison. And if you only allow your own self to. And that's what I think of a critic as someone who is stuck inside their own selves and they can't get out.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, since you bring up the description of a prison. I mean, Lewis in this chapter uses the very same. I mean, he. That's. He says, you know, the person who never steps out of his own perspective is in one very real sense imprisoning himself. And, you know, that's. And certainly we can never completely enter another person's perspective and really see things through their eyes, but literature of one kind or another is one of the means we can partially do. So he says it's like, you know, the window with the bars that we can kind of peer through and see the outside world. Otherwise we're just retreating into the dark corner.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And so another point he makes, too, about these. These taste makers, the people who say it's okay for you to love this book and it's not okay for you to love that book. You know, he says that it doesn't take into account that if a good reader has found something good in this book, then that was a good experience. And it doesn't matter if it was on a list of approved authors or not. And you shouldn't be ashamed if you love something and got something deep out of it. Sometimes I see that on the Literary Life page. People like making confessions. Well, I loved this book. It's, you know, it's okay. It's okay to love books. Your love of it, of course, is a different question of whether or not it's great art. Because I think we all know on our journey toward being literary that we've loved some things that great. I mean, I loved Nancy. True. I don't pretend for a second it's great art. But I read them and read them and read them, and I got something out of them, and I think they're valuable. And I don't think I should ever feel ashamed that I love Nancy Drew.

[Thomas Banks]

I love. I love ga hinty books, even though I don't claim at all that they're great literature. I would say they're not, but I don't think that they are the worst thing a child could read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Right.

[Thomas Banks]

For pleasure. For pleasure, not for school.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because we start from the assumption that whatever has been found good by those who really and truly read probably is good. And that is something that I try to remember. If I don't have a great experience. The first time I read a book that I know others have really loved, I immediately think the fault is me, that I need to give it another shot.

[Thomas Banks]

And I think that's the history of my reading life, is trusting other people to lead me down the path. And usually it's other books with this book mentioned this book and that, you know, that's. That's a path that never ends and very rarely has that let me down. What has let me down is getting modern. Taking modern suggestions has been more problematic.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that's right.

[Thomas Banks]

It's a different path, and it's not the path I really want to be on.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right.

[Thomas Banks]

Say those books don't have value, but it's not the way I want to go. And this is not. Doesn't mean. And I don't get the books all the time, but I do. I think if you approach it with a certain amount of trust, it helps.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that's right. I think that's why time as a judge is helpful for me personally. You know, when you have time as a judge that, you know, over centuries, many good people have found something good in this book. You can trust that you can work through it. I don't think that the newest best seller has earned that trust. And I don't think Lewis is suggesting that.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

You don't have to read every Book. It's okay to say, I don't trust this author. I don't know enough about this person.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't have time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, or I don't have time.

[Thomas Banks]

That's exactly running out of time. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

So he says, ideally, we're going to define a good book as one which permits, invites, or compels good reading. But we shall have to make do with permits and invites. I love that. So a good book is that which invites a good reading, and a bad book is that which simply cannot be read. Well, and I think we probably all three of us have had that experience. I know I have. I remember one beach vacation, my mom just was. I'm gonna go ahead and say I'm gonna get on a limb here. My mother loved Mary Higgins Clark. I mean, she was like, you love fish, trees. You have to read this. And on one beach vacation, she. She just forced this thing on me. And I thought, okay, okay. This is. This was my literal inner monologue. I'm a book snob. I'm. You know, maybe there's something good here and I'm gonna enjoy it. And she's right. And I'm just being a book snob. So I gave that book my full self. And then when I finished it, I thought, well, that's an afternoon I'm never gonna get back. It struck me so deeply that I thought, wow, there. There really is a difference between good books and bad books. That, you know, it was fun, but I remember thinking it occupied the same space in my life as watching a TV movie. And Lewis says that there are some books, you're only just gonna get the temporary pleasure or thrill or even just. I filled the time.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's interesting, since you brought up genre fiction, Lewis here somewhere, he alludes to the kind of snobbery which dismisses entire genres wholesale. So, oh, you like murder mysteries, you like science fiction or spy novels or whatever. And then you start thinking, I mean, just about the vastness of the terrain that all of those genres cover. I mean, because who was it that your mother, you say, recommended?

[Cindy Rollins]

Mary Higgins Clarke.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so, like, taking that as the low end. I mean, Mary Higgins Clark to Father Brown or to Sayers. Sayers to Conan Doyle.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, that's who I was gonna say.

[Angelina Stanford]

Quality, right there. You could say the same for.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that's his point about science fiction. Like, what are you talking about? There's some. He admits readily that's horrible science fiction out there, but that's also really, really good science fiction, which, you know, really makes the Level of myth. He talks about that in some other essays, which I totally agree with. And so, you know, when you start paying attention to what is the experience people are having, of course, you sometimes realize they're. They're not having a literary experience at all. Like when he says that some people are just going to be attracted to the rebel in a book. You know, this is my heart book, because I'm a rebel, and the book is about a rebel. Well, that honestly has nothing to do with whether or not it's a good book or not. You're just excited because you saw yourself. You just had yourself affirmed.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think in the next couple of pages, we've pretty much covered all of that. Then he gets into what he thinks is the good use of the critic and scholar. So get out your pens and papers, because this is my. This is my. This is my thing. My whole life has been devoted to this. My. My career here. What is good criticism? This is what he says. That which helps us see the work as it really is. Okay. Then after they have seen the work as it really is, leave it to the people to decide how to evaluate it. Okay? So we don't need critics to tell us if we should love it or not. What we need is help being able to see the work as it really is. Now, this is a profoundly important principle, and it's one that people just kind of blink at because they think, well, no, I mean, I can just pick it up and read it. Well, no, no. There are infinite number of obstacles to being able to enter a work. And he talks about what some of those are, but many obstacles. Okay? So when Charlotte Mason says the teacher should not get in between the student and the book, she doesn't mean that you don't do anything, because there's already a bunch of stuff between the student and the book. I think the teacher's job is to help remove as much of that stuff as they can so that the child then can fully enter the work. I think Charlotte Mason is getting at exactly the same thing that Lewis is here because she says a teacher can be a living book. So I think the good teacher's job is to help the student enter the work, but then not stand between the student and the book by making every connections and telling them what they should love and what they shouldn't love and all of that. Right. But to give them eyes to see is different. So this is how he breaks it up, and y'all can jump in here at any point. This is how he breaks it Up. So good critics or scholars, he uses the word kind of interchangeably, are those who help us to see the work as it really is. In other words, he says, those who help us get ourselves out of the way. And that's what I'm talking about, right? There are all these obstacles we have to get ourselves out of the way. And as we said before, he's condemning those critics who want to judge them book, who want to pronounce on the merits of the book. He says, we don't. We don't need any help in that. We don't need you. I don't need you to tell me if Chaucer is a master or not. That's not helpful. So for him, and this is page 121, good criticism is that which multiplies, safeguards, and prolongs those moments when a good reader is reading, well, a good book. Okay, I love that. I love that. So good criticism is the one that's going to help us have those moments of good reading. Then he says, okay, so which critics have helped me and which have not? So he clearly, the. The guy that Mr. Banks was talking about is in the these guys don't help me list. That was in the vigilant critics, those who want to evaluate and who. Well, he says those who want to use the guillotine. So who has helped Louis? Okay, number one, editors, textual critics, commentators, lexicographers. Okay. In other words, he says, these people find out what the author actually wrote, what the hard words meant, and what the allusions were to. If you do that, he says, you have done more for me than a hundred new interpretations our assessments could ever do. A hundred Amens. A thousand amens. Yes. Those critics who can tell us this is what the author wrote, this is what those words mean. This is what this is allusion to. I love a good annotated copy. Tell me that this is an allusion to this myth, that this is an allusion to this poem. This is an allusion to this scientific discovery. That stuff will open the world for you. So my favorite, my patron saint of literature teachers is George Lyman Kittredge, and he taught at Harvard University at the turn of the last century, and the Chair of English Literature was created on his behalf. And he famously said in his Shakespeare class that there were two goals to the class. We are going to find out what did Shakespeare say and what did he mean by it. That's my teaching motto right there. I want to help students hear what this author say and know what he meant by it. And that is not evaluative. That's not criticism. That's not interpretive. That's just, we need to know what he said. What do these words mean? What do these metaphors mean? And all of that. And it's not always easy to know. It's not at all easy to know what. What these words mean. We do need help. We need a guide into these books. And as I say, you know, what we need is a guide to help us hear, not a guide to evaluate. We don't need any help in knowing if we liked it or not. What we need help with is being able to hear. So before we get to the next one, let me just pause right there. Y'all have any comments about that?

[Thomas Banks]

No, but I'm looking at Amazon, and his books are not that. He only has a couple books, and they're expensive.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, George Lyman Kittridge.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

You can find his stuff on Google Books for free.

[Thomas Banks]

Google Books for free. Thank you.

[Cindy Rollins]

People. Scan him now. He's the one that wrote that popular grammar book that you see has come back.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, yeah, I use that. And that's why I looked it up. He's not popping up on that. But, yes, that's very.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's the same guy.

[Thomas Banks]

And you can get that from Blue Sky Daisies.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's updated listener to this podcast. All right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, that's right. Amy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amy Edwards. So shout out to you. So one of my. One of my absolute thrills, and I've talked about this before on the podcast, about how homeschoolers, to me, is the people, the real academics. So all these years, I've just been fascinated with George Lyman Kitchen as a scholar and a literature professor and really basically created English, the study of English literature in the United States. I threw that name out one time to a group of homeschoolers, and they were like, oh, that's the guy that wrote our grammar book. And I just thought I could walk into any PhD program and say his name and no one would know who he was.

[Angelina Stanford]

The only crew that would get that. Yeah, exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

The only crew that gets my kitten reference is a bunch of homeschool moms. And I just. I love that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Just to sort of draw a parallel, it seems, from what Lewis describes that principally the office of a sound critic is to be kind of a tour guide.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen to that. That's exactly how I describe it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've lived in the neighborhood of this landscape. This.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, I love that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let me just show you what it looks like, kind of.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I think. I think that Dante's Virgil is the guide of what a real literary critic should do, that he should hold you by the hand and explain the landscape. This is who these people are. This is their backstory. This is what's happening to them. One of the things we don't realize is how much we bring to the story. That's outside the story. Okay? We bring so much to the story. So many cultural metaphors, shared things, you know, if I say Washington's in gridlock, everybody understands that's a metaphor for Washington D.C. and politics, right? 200 years from now, they're not gonna know what you're talking about. Washington's in grim. Who is this guy Washington? Why is he all twisted up? We are constantly bringing cultural metaphors to books, and we lose them over time. And when we have lost them, it becomes so easy then to read a book entirely backwards, to completely miss the significance of what's going on. One of the things Lewis says, not in this book, but in quite a few other essays, is he says, the first duty of the reader is to read the Iliad like an Achaian chief. And because we struggle to do that, it takes effort. If you pick up the Iliad, you're reading it like a modern American period, end of story. You're going to bring modern American ideas of hierarchy and loyalty and obedience. You're going to bring modern American ideas of how the subordinate officers are supposed to act to the main king. And none of that is in the Greek perspective. None. So when. When we read the Iliad like Americans, like modern Americans instead of Achaian chiefs. This is why the first time a kid reads the Iliad, 100%, he thinks Hector's the hero. Every time, right? Every time. They love Hector and they don't like Achilles, but when they learn to read it like a Greek, suddenly they realize, oh, Achilles is the hero. I get it now. I get why they praised Achilles. And this makes sense now. So you read it completely upside down if you don't have that great. That. That proper orientation. So that leads into the second point. So the first part is the textual critics and commentators, the people who tell you what these words mean and what the allusions are to. And again, I am super, super supportive of finding a good annotated text. Now, they're not all good. I just had a question from a reader the other day about a particular annotated text that I just. And it's because he's not annotating, he's commentating, and he's. He's actually trying to put A framework onto the book that's not there. And so it's really annoying.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, that. That is fascinating because I think about that when my mother, when I was growing up, she had what was called a Scofield Bible, and it was written in, like, the 1800s. That the notes in it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

And I mean, reading, I thought, you know, that that would be scholarly to read those notes. Well, it turns out that was the opposite of scholarly because it was just someone's odd take on the words. And I say that because. And I know there are people out there who are listening, who are big fans of the Scofield Bible. So I'm not trying to be controversial about the Bible, but that would have been something like what you're saying. It wasn't. It wasn't telling you what the Hebrew or the Greek word meant.

[Cindy Rollins]

It was telling you was offering an interpretation. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's not the same thing. That's not the same thing. So I'm talking about a true annotation where they break it down and say, this is a reference to this myth and they give you a little summary of the myths. Or, this was a reference to Queen Elizabeth having enacted this, you know, political policy, and they give you a little blurb, all of the things that we wouldn't know. So a true annotated edition is a lifesaver and really, really open up a book. So the second type of critic that helps Lewis, he says, is the literary historian. These are the guys that I'm always recommending. These are my favorites, he says. These are the people who put their work in its setting. Okay. Now, he doesn't just mean, like, you know, tell me what else was going on in the world at that time. It's much bigger than that because it's really about understanding the imagination of a people. The cultural metaphors, they have their perspective on reality. So it's much more than just saying, well, the Fairy Queen was written when Queen Elizabeth was on the throne. That's the least of the problematic things for entering the work. You have to understand a whole medieval perspective on reality. So he says what he's talking about here is the critics who can show me what demands these books were meant to satisfy. What furniture? This is my favorite line. What furniture they presupposed in the minds of their readers. Okay, so an author writes a book, and he's assuming a bunch of shared cultural metaphors, a shared cultural imagination that he thinks, in the room of your mind, this is the furniture that's there. And that is what he's using to communicate. We don't have that. We need help to get there. Now. There are helps. There are absolutely helps. Lewis is a help. So Lewis's preface to Paradise Loss is exactly what he's talking about. He puts it in the context. He goes through the Renaissance understanding of hierarchy. He goes through the religious assumptions of Milton. He's going to tell you what you need to know to have the right imagination to enter this work as a Renaissance person. So he's an example. E.M. tillard, who was a colleague and friend of Lewis, and they respected each other's work. So this wasn't like the other guy. His book, the Elizabethan World Picture is an example of this. The whole book is devoted to helping us understand Renaissance cosmology, the understanding of hierarchy, their understanding of metaphors. And once you understand that, you can enter all these Renaissance works and suddenly it makes a bunch of sense, what's going on? What was a closed door to you before is open now. So, yeah, so these people are our tour guides. Where Tilly is saying, this is how the Renaissance man saw the world, where Lewis is saying, this is how Milton saw the world. And others, Northrop Fry and Harold Goddard, my favorite critics, are the ones who can do this, who can help me to grasp the imagination behind these works. And when I say imagination, I'm talking about shared cultural metaphors and perspectives on reality and all the kinds of things that we don't have as moderns or that we have the opposite view. So he says these kinds of critics have headed me off from false approaches. Amen. That's what I'm talking about when I say you will read the work the opposite way that it's intended to be if you're not properly oriented. So he says those guys have helped him from reading a book and giving a false interpretation of it. They've taught me what to look for, enabled me in some degree to put myself into the frame of mind of those to whom they were addressed. In other words, they help us get ourselves out of the way. And I love that. And what about you, Mr. Banks? You have some favorite critics that do this, too. I mean, look, I've been reading. I've been teaching for 26 years, and I don't. I don't pick up a book without a guide. I'm going to read what Goddard says. What does Lewis say? What does Till you say? What is fright? I'm going to read all of those guys before I jump into a work, not because they're going to tell me what it means, but because they're going to orient me for the experience I'm about to have. So I'm a huge, huge proponent of having a trustworthy guide to hold me by the hand as I go through these works.

[Angelina Stanford]

So to answer your question, do I have my sort of guiding lights? Yeah, three or four. I mean, to start with one we have in common. Dorothy Sears didn't write a whole lot of literary criticism, but she wrote some, I think some very valuable stuff, especially a long essay she wrote on the development of allegory from Dante to Bunyan. And that's. It's not, it's not a book length performance or anything. It's all of 30 pages. But she describes, here's what allegory does in essence, and here's how the individual, you know, greats who have taken it in practice have approached it differently. So this is why. This is how Dante differs from Spencer, this is how both differ from Bunyan, and this is how it changes over the course of three centuries. And that's. Yeah, things like that are interesting.

[Cindy Rollins]

I noticed that that was not evaluative. She isn't saying this makes Dante better than Spencer. I mean, that's not the point.

[Angelina Stanford]

Actually. She does a little bit. In the end, she comes down kind of hard on Bunyan.

[Cindy Rollins]

But anyway, that we all come down hard on Bunyan. I'm on Team Sayers for that one.

[Angelina Stanford]

That Lewis alludes to in this essay, he mentions McKayle. J.W. mcHale, who was a literary historian, wrote about quite a large field. I mean, he was a disciple of William Morris and also wrote about the Greeks and the Romans. And so yeah, J.W. mcHale, his history of Latin Literature is a kind of standard handbook if you're, if you're a classicist. And that's a, that's a great tool to have. So, yeah, I have, I have quite a few.

[Cindy Rollins]

What about you, Cindy? Don't you, aren't you a fan of Isaac Asimov's Shakespeare Guy?

[Thomas Banks]

I do like his. Now I like his book probably maybe for the wrong reasons. I love that he, he does all that you say and he does it in a very conversational style. He just. But he also gives his opinions, which I find fascinating. I don't always agree with him, but he'll say, like, this is the way Brutus. Some people think, you know, Brutus is the hero of this story, but this is why I do not agree with that. Or, you know, he will give some literary criticism in that way, but mostly he's just talking with you through the book like Here, Here they mention the foul witch Sycorax, and there is no mythology surrounding this person. So maybe it came from here, maybe it came from there. And I love that. I love it. And I love his opinions also, but I don't feel any need to have his opinions or put them on.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sycorax is the witch mother of Caliban and the Tempest.

[Thomas Banks]

That's correct.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. Yeah. All right.

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't think that Lewis would object to that kind of stuff that you're talking about. That is Brutus the hero. That's kind of gray to me. Whether or not that crosses the line into evaluative criticism. I mean, to me, it's a statement of the ongoing controversy around the book. A lot of people think this character is the hero, but I think the text actually supports this character as the hero.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. And he does do that. He uses the text. He doesn't just say, in my opinion, you know, he's very much into the text, but of course, he's bringing a great mind to it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. And so, yeah, so we're talking about guides who are going to lead you, by the hand, deeper into the text. So bad examples of that are be that guides that lead directly out of the text. So somebody who wants to talk about Marxist feminist interpretation of Jane Austen is going to talk very little about Jane Austen and a lot about Marxist feminist theory. Okay. One of the reasons why I ditched the PhD program I was in is because there was this move away from reading literature to just reading about literary theory. So just reading about queer theory or Marxist feminist theory or whatever the, you know, theory du jour was for the moment. And you actually, if you look at a bunch of PhD programs in English, it's almost always on theory instead of on the literature. So when Lewis says, don't read a literary theory book, just read Chaucer again, that there's no literary theory about Chaucer, that's going to be better than just reading chaucer Again, I 100% agree with that. But what he's not saying is don't have a guide when you enter Chaucer. Kittredge's two books on Chaucer are fantastic. I don't think anybody should read Chaucer without Kittredge as a guide. That's not what he's saying. He's not saying, don't understand what the words mean.

[Thomas Banks]

Please stop. I'm running out of life.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's what I do, Cindy. I just recommend books and get more money out of it.

[Thomas Banks]

They're big books.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think he caps his argument beautifully when he says, we do not need the critics to enable us to enjoy the authors, but rather we need the authors to enable us to enjoy the critics.

[Cindy Rollins]

I loved that because he says, I can't know if Aristotle's theory of tragedy is right unless I can say, oh, yes, that's what Sophocles is doing. So, yeah, he's absolutely right there. So the third type of critic, which I had to grin at this because I hope I fall into this category. I hope I fall into all of those categories, actually. But I feel pretty confident that I can say I fall into category three. And he said, it's the critics who have so much enthusiasm.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

What they're reading that people get encouraged to try to read it themselves. Those guys now, and those are all.

[Thomas Banks]

Of our favorite teachers, are the people that love something.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And I. You know, I also have to think about your debunking comment, because debunkers are not enthusiastic. They're cynical. They're above it all. They're telling you, don't read this and don't read that, but you don't. They never make me excited about anything. They make me kind of depressed.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, in fact, this quote that he has here, which I find chilling, he said, this view of the matter will not, I am afraid, satisfy what may be called the vigilant school of critics. Excuse me. To them, criticism is a form of social and ethical hygiene.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. That. Hygiene. And again, one of those. One of those words that kind of sends a chill up your spine when applied to literature.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And so he says, in my experience, a good commentator or a good literary historian. So these are. What we've been talking about is more likely, without a word of praise or blame to set us right, if we. If we're misunderstanding a work. So that's it. They're not praising or blaming. You know, the book I'm reading right now that I'm thoroughly enjoying, on the Evolution of the Literary Night, it's an older book, and I found it, of course, in the footnotes of another book because that's. That's how I. That's how I find these people. I just keep following the footnotes. And he's not making any kind of assessment. He's just simply tracing the literary tradition of how the night changes over time. And anytime that there might be the invitation to make an interpretation or to assess or praise or blame, he says, well, that's not the point of this book. I'm simply observing the way that this character has changed over time. That's what's going on.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, this really comes into play when people start looking at book lists for homeschoolers like Ambleside on, or even reading Charlotte Mason's words herself. She's very much coming from a certain world, you know, Victorian world, which was very ordered in a certain way. And people who read it with modern eyes get offended by things she's saying, which it's unnecessary to be offended by context.

[Cindy Rollins]

And the words don't mean the same thing, thing to us that they meant to her.

[Thomas Banks]

And people panic and dismiss her because of that. And it's unfortunate. And even some of the old books that people, you know, when we come to these old books and we can't accept them for the time period that they were in, once again, we're hiding ourselves in that cave.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And so he goes on to talk about the debunkers. And that's where the line is, the use the guillotine becomes an addiction. Oh, I just, I just loved that. I loved that so much. And talks about, you cannot be armed to the teeth and surrendered at the same moment. So if you're looking for a fight with these books, he says, you're never going to get anything out of it. I really love this paragraph because I relate to this. To take a man up very sharp, to demand sternly that he shall explain himself, to dodge to and fro with your questions, to pounce on every apparent inconsistency. Inconsistency may be a good way of exposing a false witness or a malingerer. How do you say that?

[Angelina Stanford]

Malingerer.

[Cindy Rollins]

Malingerer. Thank you. Unfortunately, is also the way of making sure that if a shy or tongue tied man has a true and difficult tale to tell you, you will never learn it. The armed and suspicious approach, which may save you from being bamboozled by a bad author, may also blind and deafen you to the shy and elusive merits, especially if they are unfashionable of a good one.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think he has Fr. Levis in mind again when he wrote that passage. So Levis was notorious for browbeating his students in class? No, he was the kind of teacher he like. He enjoyed making his student, his freshmen, feel stupid in front of their peers.

[Cindy Rollins]

I have had that professor. I know that professor.

[Angelina Stanford]

Probably all of us have at one point or another.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I think it's a sign of a deeply insecure person that they've got to make themselves feel smarter than their students. I mean, how hard is that? That's kind of sad. Oh, I'm smarter than these freshmen. Well, I should hope so. You're the professor. Did we really need to have that proved? But yeah. So that's how he ends up that. That section and then he moves on to the epilogue. Now, do we want to talk before we jump into the epilogue here in the last few minutes about a question came up on the. On the discussion group about writing in your books. Do we want to talk?

[Thomas Banks]

Oh. Oh, yeah. So what does Lewis say that brought that up?

[Cindy Rollins]

I don't remember. I don't remember what it was or what we said that made people think that it was a dig at that. I write in my books. Okay, but. And I saw several people basically said the same thing. I am making my own personal annotated edition. I'm defining words, I'm writing down illusions. I'm tracing motifs and patterns. I'm tracing, you know, any of the number of literary things that I'm interested in. Those notes, though, are to help me hear better. It's kind of a running narration, right? This is what I'm hearing the author say and I'm noting it. So I am more deeply paying attention with my note taking. That is very different than note taking, which is you talking over the author. I've been in situations where I've heard teachers tell students argue with the book and write it in the margin. No, absolutely not. You can't be arguing with somebody before you've heard the whole argument. Hear the man out before you're already, you know, making your cross examination notes in the margin should not be a cross examination of a work of fiction.

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I had made fun of my copy of the Dubliners which has marginalia in it from some freshman college class. And it is very comical. And when I read it, I just get such a joy out of it. Because reading these notes, I'm being kind of nasty, I guess. But because I've come from such a place of ignorance, I should not be making, you know, I used to be that person. So I guess I'm laughing at myself. But, but so there's that. There's. I'm writing in this college class and I'm putting down. I'm just making these really weird connections between things that don't really exist and I'm not actually getting the things that do exist. There's that. But I also write in my books, certain books I write extensively. And Charlotte Mason's volumes I have marked up. I've used a different pen for every time I've ever read it. So that, you know, it's like me at 25, me at 32, me at 40.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah. I find that fascinating too, to go back and look at my own notes. I'm also opposed to any kind of gimmicky write in your.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

Because I think that everybody's got to kind of find their own way. And when you're talking about things we're doing to help, it's the same thing with narration. You can't tell somebody what they should have narrated and you can't tell somebody what they should have underlined in their book.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I think that gets very dangerous when we, when we start systematizing how people should look at their books. Yep, yep. It's, it's. It becomes truly. Everything he's saying in here is ruined in the book. When you, you approach a book with a system of how you're going to tear it apart.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yep, exactly. And so again, it goes down to everything he's been saying about. It's the disposition of the reader. So, you know, you can take notes in a way that is helping you to hear, but you can also take notes in a way that is shutting you off from hearing. And it's going to depend on the book and the reader and the type of notes that are being taken. But any kind of gimmicky highlight, every time you see the word red or highlight all the proper nouns or something, that's just absurd. It's absolutely absurd. It's what Lewis is talking about when he says anti literary reading. There's no literary scholar or good reader in the world world who needs to highlight proper names. So that kind of stuff, I just groan and I feel like dead.

[Thomas Banks]

And I think that does show a difference between a reader and a non reader. Someone who approaches books analytically rather than as a reader, as that is an analytical way of approaching a book. And it is not a synthetic way of approaching a book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely not. Absolutely not. Okay. So then he goes on to talk about again in the epilogue here, that just because you're reading it doesn't mean you're approving it. And that we don't. We don't. Laying yourself open to a book doesn't mean you're going to suddenly accept its whole perspective of reality. You're just, for the moment, hearing them out. That's all that's happening.

[Angelina Stanford]

I mean, he compares reading specifically similar to listening. I mean, it's not as though listening to what someone has to say to us in a conversation is necessarily going to convince us that every word they have to say is gospel truth. But it's, you know, it's a courtesy, right?

[Cindy Rollins]

But in a conversation with someone, you should shut up and listen, because that's how you have a conversation. And so if you want to have a conversation with Dante, you need to shut up and listen.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he says earlier in the same chapter that a predisposition to disagree with an author or to argue with him is kind of like entering into a conversation, prepared to distrust the person you meet. So no matter what they say, we're going to find some excuse to confirm our own prejudices, our own judgments of him that we formed at the get go.

[Cindy Rollins]

So then he closes it out by saying, so why? Why do we read it all? And he ends up saying, I wrote in the margin, fat souls. I think this goes right back to the abolition of man, right? We read to have fat souls. So the nearest I've got to an answer is that we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more than ourselves. So this goes back to what we've already said, right? We want to have other perspectives, to get beyond ourselves in some way. And that means seeing the world through other eyes, at least temporarily. And it doesn't mean you've accepted all of it, but you also don't have to be at war with it, just have the other perspective. He says we want to see with other eyes, to imagine with other imaginations, to feel with other hearts, as well as with our own. Literature as Logos. I love this. Literature as logos is a series of windows, even of doors. One of the things we feel after reading a great work is I have got out, or from another point of view, I have got in love that. I love that.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow. He's so good at those kind of things. That's just classic. Classic Lewis. Right. There something you want to say?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah. I mean, it's a metaphor. He goes back to, I think a number of times in throughout his books, the idea of literature as emancipation, or as jailbreak, if you prefer. And he says that somewhere. He says, those instructors who tell us that we should beware of escapism in literature are not to be trusted. Because what class of human beings is most concerned about people escaping? And that would be jailers.

[Thomas Banks]

Wow. Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Tolkien says something very similar in his essay on fairy stories. Very similar.

[Thomas Banks]

So this is. This just made me think, so Castle building is when we impose our own selves on the book. But escapism is really us getting into the book and doing it properly. So that's really interesting because he's against this idea. He says, castle building, you know. But we don't want to approach a book as, how do I get in this book and build my own fantasy world?

[Cindy Rollins]

Not gonna have my James Bond fantasy, Right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, yeah. Like I'm reading a Harlequin romance and, you know, I'm gonna build a castle. A romantic ideal. But. Yeah, so. But we should. We are escaping our own mind when we get inside a book.

[Angelina Stanford]

My favorite example of. Of castle building. One of them, anyway. A professor of mine a while ago said that he went to a medievalist conference in Kalamazoo, Michigan, many years ago, and he said that sort of for fun. All the professors there, they sit down and for a reading of Hamlet together, informal reading of Hamlet. And we were assigned our parts according to our eminence in the pecking order. So the famous professor from Harvard got to be Hamlet. Hamlet. And then, anyway, he says, one guy is assigned the role of Polonius, you know, the old. Well, old, foolish minister of state. And he says, really? I really see myself more as Hamlet. And the guy assigning the role says, yes, and that's why you're going to be Polonius. That was Casserole. All his years of erudition, he had just seen himself as Hamlet when really.

[Cindy Rollins]

He wasn't so good. That's a perfect example. He needed to read a different part. We all need to read a different part. And that's what Lewis closes it out with. Right. Reading literature admits us to experiences other than our own. And he goes on to say that those of us who've been true readers our whole life really seldom realize the full extent of which other authors have shaped us and given us other eyes. And we realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense, but inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. I love that. Okay. One of the things that gets me really upset. I'm a pretty easygoing person, but this gets me really upset is when I feel like people talk about literature in a way that makes it smaller. Because I just think, why are you trying to make this huge world tiny? Probably because they want to be in control of it. But this is what Lewis is saying. We don't want to be in this little tiny world. We would suffocate. My own eyes are not enough for me. I will see through those of others. And then he ends it with his very famous paragraph. But in reading great literature, I become a thousand men and yet remain myself like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see here as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself and am never more myself than when I do.

[Thomas Banks]

I think it comes down to those two words, hubris and humility. And that's what it is. We come to the book either humbly or with hubris.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes. So will we have a mirror or a window? Will. Well, we demand to see. I mean, hubris says we want to see. We already know everything. There is nothing to be taught. We're just going to judge and have ourselves affirmed.

[Thomas Banks]

We're going to. Yeah. Oh, wow.

[Cindy Rollins]

And that temptation applies to every kind of reading. People read the Bible like that, you know, that we. It's. We've done it ourselves. That it's a great temptation to read the Bible, to have ourselves affirmed. That's why the Bible has been used to justify so many horrific things.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

But it's. What's hard to do, is humble yourself and let it change you.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. We don't wield the Bible as a weapon, although we're so tempted to because we take it out of context or we don't see the big picture.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm. So anybody have any final thoughts? I love this book. I hope that we've clarified some of the things here, and the good critic from the bad critic and good reading from bad reading.

[Thomas Banks]

I think to summarize what we can do when we look at our children is give them good books to read, and they should have some freedom to find their own feet as readers. But we should be giving them the very best. And then when the time is right, I think then we introduce these other ideas that there's more. Guess what? There's even more here than you realize. And it's wonderful. Wait till you find this out. But we don't have to be nervous or have anxiety that somehow we haven't taught our children literary criticism. First they get love, and then we can come to these. These. Then we can come to people like you, Angelina, the teacher, and say, what? What is it about this medieval cosmology? I don't get it. And it doesn't have to be something that we approach with anxiety.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. And see, I think if you take the perspective that the best preparation for the great books is reading the same stuff that the guys who wrote them read, then that takes the pressure off. Right. You don't need the child's version of Paradise Lost. What you need to do is read Genesis Right. You need to read the fairy tales, you need to read the myths. That stuff's not intimidating. Nobody has to be a specialized teacher to teach that stuff. Just read it and enjoy it, and then you'll be ready. Then you'll be much closer to having the right imagination and mindset. Now, you're still going to need a guy, there's no question. But I think this perspective makes the books much less intimidating to, first of all, say there's no personal flaw in you. Why you can't pick up the Iliad and understand it. There's no personal flaw. It's hard. There's, you know, a couple of thousand years in between you and this book. But there are people that can help you overcome it. I find that extremely encouraging to think that, yeah, there's any book we can jump into with the right help. I mean, really, it's like trying to read Greek if you don't know Greek. We need an interpreter. We need a translator. We need someone to say, that's what these words mean. And even when you're reading the books in English, you still need someone to help you with, this is what these words mean.

[Thomas Banks]

And that's. And I always say that about nature study. You can't understand the Greeks if you don't understand nature the way they did. There are many things that are on the table here, many ways of looking at the world, even male, female relationships, all of that comes into play.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, we're at the end of our time. Thank you so much, Mr. Banks, for joining us. And we very much appreciate our Patreon subscribers, those of you who are supporting the work here. It's expensive to get it done and we really want to get it done well, so we do a appreciate that. And we are continuing to add more bonus features, bonus classes, bonus talks, and these live Q and A. So again, you can check that out. All right, so until then, good luck cultivating your literary life. Thank you for listening to the Literary Life podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member only Patreon forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts. The new Mason jar and the well read poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Angelina Stanford]

A Cat by Edward Thomas. She had a name among the children but no one loved, though someone owned her, locked her out of doors at bedtime and had her kittens duly drowned in spring. Nevertheless, this cat ate blackbirds, thrushes, nightingales, and birds of bright voice and plume and flight, as well as scraps from neighbors pails. I loathed and hated her for this one speckle on a thrush's breast was worth a million such. And yet she lived long till God gave her rest.