Episode 338: "The Vulture" by Samuel Johnson – Short Story Summer Remix

Summary

Literary Life Podcast – Episode 338

"The Vulture" by Samuel Johnson – Short Story Summer Remix

Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins
Release Date: July 21, 2026
Summary by: [Your Name]

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Episode Overview

This episode of The Literary Life features an in-depth discussion of Samuel Johnson's satirical essay "The Vulture," explored as part of the podcast’s Short Story Summer Remix. The hosts, Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, and Cindy Rollins, dig into Johnson’s satirical method, his place in the neoclassical tradition, and how the essay critiques the moral failures of war and leadership. The conversation weaves through literary history, the evolution of poetic and prose forms, and the enduring importance of satire and shared cultural touchstones.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Neoclassical Foundations & Samuel Johnson’s Era

• Samuel Johnson and the Neoclassical Age:

  • Johnson defined poetry as “the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason” ([20:14]).
  • Neoclassicism is characterized by clarity, moral didacticism, elevation of reason over imagination, and satirical forms ([22:03]–[24:55]).
  • Satire, especially in this era, often served both to critique societal and governmental excesses and to bring audiences back to moral or rational order.

• Neoclassical vs. Romantic Worldview:

  • Johnson positioned imagination as subordinate to reason—a stance later directly challenged by Romantic poets ([20:24], [26:55]).
  • Romantics emphasized mystery, ambiguity, and the vitality of imagination ([27:40]).

• Pedagogical Implications:

  • The conversation questions the limits of labeling literary approaches (e.g., "classical educator") and affirms reading across periods without restricting oneself to ideological boundaries ([28:37]), echoing Charlotte Mason’s philosophy of offering "living ideas."

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2. Who Was Samuel Johnson?

• Life and Legacy:

  • Nicknamed "the Great Cham of English Literature" ([35:38]), Johnson was noted for his authority, wit, and industriousness, best known for his monumental English dictionary ([37:35]–[38:29]).
  • He authored essays, poetry, and the short novel Rasselas (an allegory about the search for happiness), and was plagued by depression and Tourette’s ([46:30]–[47:17]).
  • Famous for forming London's original Literary Club, the era’s coffeehouse Inklings ([43:34]; [44:07]).

• Quote – On Government and Human Nature:
  “How few of all the ills that human hearts endure the part that kings or laws can cause or cure.” — Samuel Johnson ([68:45])

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3. "The Vulture": Satire and Social Critique

• Essay Background:

  • Published as “The Idler, No. 22” amid the Seven Years War; excluded from later collections, likely due to its perceived seditiousness ([47:25], [48:10]).

• Frame and Structure:

  • Begins as a meditation on animal speech, shifting into a fable where vultures question why humans kill without eating their prey—the mother vulture explains that humans kill not for survival, but out of senseless violence, which benefits the vultures ([49:12–50:18]).

• Satire and Morality:

  • The satirical inversion casts vultures as more humane than humans, critiquing war and the “leaders” who orchestrate slaughter for self-interested reasons ([60:37]–[62:49]).

  • Notable Quote (Mother Vulture):
    “Man is the only beast who kills that which he does not devour, and this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our species.” ([60:37])

• Critique of Leaders:

  • The essay subtly indicts those in power:
    “There’s always someone... [who] seems to take the most pleasure in what is happening.” — Discussed as likely a veiled criticism of war leaders ([62:23]).

• Contemporary Resonance:

  • Links are drawn between Johnson's satire and both World War I poetry (the shift from patriotic idealism to bitter realism) and our modern lack of shared cultural reference points ([14:08], [57:39]).
  • Discusses the dangers and value of satire—distinguishing between Horatian (gentler) and Juvenalian (harsher, as with Swift) forms ([54:36]–[56:19]).

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Johnson’s Definition of Poetry:
  “Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason.” — Samuel Johnson ([20:24])

• On Imagination and Reason:
  “Imagination is sort of the handmaid to reason, who is the queen.” — Angelina Stanford ([20:24])

• On Shared Language and Culture:
  “We have no common references. There used to be a common language. There is no common language anymore.” — Host ([13:52])

• On Satire’s Role:
  “A culture has gone horribly wrong when it can't laugh at itself.” — Host ([56:40])

• On Governmental Power:
  “Forms of government are seldom the result of much deliberation... Laws are often occasional, often capricious, made always by a few and sometimes by a single voice.” — Angelina, quoting Johnson ([68:45])

• On Leadership and War:
  “From the vulture’s perspective, they must be delighting in stirring up this slaughter. Nothing else makes sense…” — Host ([62:28])

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Important Timestamps

• Intro, friendly banter: [00:00–03:41]
• Poetry and education, value of form: [03:41–06:37]
• Commonplace quotes from Malms & Ralph Moody: [06:56–13:41]
• Neoclassicism, Johnson's poetic theory: [19:05–24:55]
• Pendulum swings: Rationality to Romanticism: [26:55–28:37]
• Samuel Johnson’s life, work, and influence: [35:22–40:13]
• Literary Club & essay-writing context: [43:21–46:30]
• Background and summary of "The Vulture": [47:25–50:18]
• Satire: forms and cultural need: [53:19–58:51]
• Analysis of "The Vulture"’s message: [59:49–66:31]
• Johnson on government, legacy, and society: [66:31–71:59]
• Episode wrap-up, reflections on the summer series: [71:59–72:37]

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Tone and Style

The conversation is warm, witty, and erudite, flavored with personal anecdotes, literary debate, and affectionate teasing among the hosts. The episode balances deep literary analysis with humor and practical applications to reading and education.

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For Further Exploration

• Read: Samuel Johnson’s The Idler essays, including "The Vulture."
• Explore: Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson for more on Johnson’s life and times.
• Contrast: Romantic poetry’s response to Neoclassicism (see Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge).
• Listen: Previous episodes on Joseph Addison and neoclassical satire.

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If you haven’t listened, this episode provides a robust introduction to Samuel Johnson, the neoclassical mindset, and the powerful ways literature and satire provoke thought about war, leadership, and human nature—always with an eye to both the past and the present.

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“It is always easier to debunk than to build reverence—laughter can restore our proportions, but only if we know what is worthy of loving.” — Paraphrase inspired by the hosts ([57:45], [56:40])

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.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

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 to episode 18 of the Literary Life Podcast with your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins. And today we are joined once again by a very special guest, someone I'm terribly fond of, Thomas Banks, the voice behind the poetry.

[Angelina Stanford]

Good to be back as always.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I'm terribly fond of him, too, in a different way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, thank you both.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

You're about to have a cat fight on the air right here, ladies and gentlemen. Literary catfi.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right here.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Stay in your lane, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, sorry. As a mother.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I'm joking. I'm joking. Today on episode 18, we were going to talk about a Samuel Johnson essay, but before we get to that, one of the things that I have been. You know, Cindy, it's so funny because, you know, like everybody does on a date, I talk about Cindy Rollins. And so we're getting to know each other. I knew that he was a poet and had a great love of poetry, so I would. I would tell him all the time about. Well, you know, Cindy Rollins has done more than anybody to promote poetry as a fundamental part of education. Of course, he got really excited about that. He was quite smitten with you before he met you. Just on the basis of that and the story which I would tell him of your sons reciting Charge of the Light Brigade.

[Cindy Rollins]

Actually, it was crossing the bar. He recited Crossing the Bar on the ship out. When he was standing on the deck of the hms. The uss. The uss.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

The HMS What Country?

[Cindy Rollins]

Your children. The HMS Pinafore.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

That's a whole other episode.

[Cindy Rollins]

But actually, actually he could have done. He. I am the very model of a model modern major general, if required.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Correct. But that's the Pirates of Penzance.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, the nerd factor is high in this episode, but, yeah, so I used to. I just talk about how much you have done to encourage people to jump into poetry. But the backlash of that is that you have succeeded, and that has brought its own problem, namely that everyone's walking around with their volume of poetry saying, now what?

[Cindy Rollins]

So true.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And so we're really excited that we're going to attempt to jump into that gap right there, the now What? So, on September 19, we are very proudly hosting a webinar called how to Love, An Introduction to the Fundamentals of Poetry that will be given by our very own poet and teacher, Thomas Banks. So, Thomas Banks, can you tell us a little bit about the what now?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, I mean, I suppose what I want to do, amongst other things, introducing the fundamentals of poetry, meter, rhyme, etc. How those work in English poetry. And also just to communicate that the love of poetry is not something strictly for intellectuals. It shouldn't be. And when it gets relegated to. To that, you know, rarefied part of the world, it suffers. It's something for everyone. And it's. Yeah. A natural good that I. That I hope, you know, people will find. Will find interesting.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, I really appreciate that. So one of the. One of the struggles. Obstacles to being able to love poetry, of course, is that it has its own language and its own form and it's foreign to us. And so. And so Mr. Banks here is gonna. Is gonna break that down for us and help us to understand the form of poetry and how it works and how it's put together. But that won't be like academic kind of dry death. It's gonna be, as I tell my students, form in forms. Right. Form is the gateway into it. So you're gonna. You're gonna give us the fundamentals then, in a way that brings these poems to life.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, we aren't gonna be snobs when we get done with this.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, speak for yourself, Sydney.

[Angelina Stanford]

I struggle not to be sometimes myself. So maybe, you know, maybe my own moral qualifications here are questionable, but. No, it's. I want. Poetry should be a normal part of a normal reader's literary life. Exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it's not something. I don't think poetry is or should be something that one needs a degree in to enjoy. That's absolutely not true.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

No, exactly. And so this webinar is going to just take us by the hand into these poetry to make. To make sense of this foreign landscape so that we can. So that we can love it. So I'm really excited about that. Again, that's September 19th. It's a 90 minute webinar, how to Love Poetry. If you're interested in finding out more information about it or to register, you can go to Angelina stanford.com and click on any number of buttons that are waiting for you. I've tried to make it as easy as possible. So, yeah, that's September 19th, so mark your calendars for that.

[Cindy Rollins]

I clicked.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, I saw. I was so tickled when I saw Cindy Rollins. The Cindy Rollins signed up.

[Cindy Rollins]

I would not miss it. I'm really excited about it.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I am too.

[House of Humane Letters Announcer]

I'm going to be there.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I'm going to be there. Not photobombing his webinar, but I will be silently jumping up and down in the corner with pen in hand, taking notes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, absolutely.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, and I guess that's something else. We could say it's for the novice who wants help, but it's also for people who already love poetry, who want to go deeper. I know that every time you talk about poetry, I learn something more. So before we jump into this Samuel Johnson essay, Mr. Banks, do you have a commonplace quote you'd like to share with us?

[Angelina Stanford]

I do, yeah. Looking back a few months in my own commonplace book, I came across this quote from W. Somerset Malms, Writer's Notebook. He says, I am always suspicious of a novelist's theories. I have never known them to be anything other than a justification of his own short.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

He says elsewhere, I've forget in which of his books that he once came across a critical article where the author said that it was not right to tell. To narrate a novel in the first person.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Not right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's not right. It's somehow an illegitimate form of narration. And he. I mean, it's, you know, one of those. By what rationale did you reach this conclusion? Oh, because you yourself cannot write a novel in the first person. It's so. Yeah, I.

[Cindy Rollins]

But is he saying that you don't have the. You're not qualified to know. You have to look at things you can see from outside and you can't see yourself from outside.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think what he's saying is that the theories of what a novel ought to be as formed by a novelist, themselves tend to play to their strengths and to disguise their weaknesses. That seems to be. I think that's his point.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So beware the theory. That's just the thinly veiled attempt to justify Your own preferences?

[Angelina Stanford]

Pretty much, yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

I thought, okay, well, that's.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

I've joked it makes you afraid to write anything because you might be like, okay, what am I doing here?

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

No, no, no. I think he's talking about, you know, you have to take with a great. The gift of the muse and the gift of interpretation are not the same gift. And so take with a grain of salt when writers write about writing, because they could be just trying to justify their own preferences and their own abilities.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

It's kind of like I used to always joke with my kids that I was constantly on the search for parenting advice that, you know, affirmed my general neglect and failure.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's true. That is true.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Being a helicopter mom. That's all.

[Cindy Rollins]

See, that's right. I'm just a French mom.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Tiger mom. I'm a hands off mom. Go play outside and supervise. C. Turns out there was a principle for that, for my laziness.

[Cindy Rollins]

Amen.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

All right, Cindy, what do you have for us?

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, my. My quote comes from Little Britches by Ralph Moody, and it's one of my favorite quotes. And I just recently wrote an article for the Commonplace Quarterly where I talked about different mothers and how, as we were just speaking about, even when I failed as a mother, I was still introducing my children and maybe hoping there's healing through meeting these other mothers. And one of my favor mothers is Ralph Moody's mother from Little Britches. And here's what he says about her reading aloud. After we had our picnic, Mother read to us. She didn't read like other people. She talked a book. I mean, if you were where you could hear her but couldn't see her, you'd be sure she was telling the story from memory instead of reading. And another thing different about Mother's reading was that she didn't care if you watched the book over her shoulder. I used to watch her eyes by the hour as she read. They would swoop across the page like a barn swallow across a hay field. Then she would look up and recite for a full minute before she looked back at the book again. When Mother read, we children had to be quiet and pay attention. We could do almost anything we pleased with our hands, like making whistles, putting dried berries for beads, or playing with dolls. But if one of us whispered, father would snap his fingers. If we ever got to the third snap, Mother would close the book and we would do something else for a while. And that's from Little Britches. I just thought that was so ambleside. Ish. You know, the children can work with their hands while the mother reads. And I just really love Mary Emma and her beautiful, beautiful reading life.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, that's good. I mean, it sounds like she reads in a way that the story comes alive because you think she's telling it and not reading. I love that. That's great.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And there's another quote he has about her reading, her reciting. After she was done reading aloud, they would beg her to recite, and she would recite Horatius at the Bridge to them.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, wow. Horatius at the Bridges. That seems to be one of those poems that at a certain time, everyone

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

memorized at one time. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

And. Yeah, I don't think you would see it in anthologies anymore, but. Yeah, that's. That's.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, it takes 20 minutes to read it. I know this. I read it every morning for a while because we were trying to memorize it, and finally. So 20 minutes a morning was kind of long. So finally I recorded myself reading it because I was tired of saying it out loud. So I would say we somewhat memorized it. We could randomly quote parts of it, but we never got it down. Yeah. All 20 minutes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've never read the whole thing. I mean, there's the famous stanza.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, but you've probably read it in Latin.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, no, that's an English poem.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Is it an English poem?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it's about the Roman war with the Sabines, with Etruscans.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm butchering it. But it's.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, Cindy can quote it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Lars Porsena of Clusium, by the nine gods he swore. I'm not gonna go on, because. Take me 20 minutes. No, and I couldn't. I actually couldn't. But it's a great poem for boys. I mean. I mean, it's a great poem for girls, too. But it ends with, you know, a very heroic act.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, yeah. He jumps in the water.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it was Winston Churchill's. One of his favorite poems. I remember reading in a biography of him that that was one that he was reciting snatches of, you know, now and again in his leisure time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, he actually. Yes, and they have. And this is. I talk about this a lot. I have it in a couple of my talks. But he actually uses that poem and the Darkest Hour. Those who hear me frequently speak know.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

That's right.

[Cindy Rollins]

We failed to mention the darkest Hour. But he uses it because everybody. So he's talking to the lower classes of people on the train compared to.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, yeah. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'd forgotten that Scene. Sorry, I interrupted there.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no. And he uses that poem. Because they all knew that poem, whether they'd memorized it word for word, they all knew the heart and soul of that poem. And so he starts quoting it and. And the working class man starts quoting it, and it's what fuels their patriotism and their desire not to give in to Hitler.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Gosh, my brain is going in a million places right now. One he was able to tap into that Churchill was. Because that was a shared cultural understanding.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's the whole point of my talks usually.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And we have so little of that now. I'm convinced that's one of the reasons we have such a breakdown in public discourse. We have no common references. It used to be Bible, mythology, poetry. There used to be a common language. There is no common language anymore.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I mean, later on, when we talk about the Vulture, we can talk about war, and we've talked a lot about the World War I, but. So you had this charge of the Light Brigade ethos in the culture. There's not to make reply, there's not to reason why. Then you move into Wilford Owen and using that same principle of the dialectic, destroying the culture by the. You know what? Dulce decorum est pro patri amore. Making fun of the idea that it is a good and beautiful thing to die for one's country because it was so horrific in World War I. So that ethos goes away. But then you see Winston Churchill, he's kind of a guy who brings that back, that the other ethos of, you know, let's really fight for our country, let's not give in.

[Angelina Stanford]

I guess I feel the need to tie C.S. lewis into everything. I was talking with my brother a while ago, and he told me that Churchill, towards the end of World War II, I think he offered C.S. lewis a knighthood or what. Yeah, it was. He offered C.S. lewis. It was either a knighthood or like the DSO, the Distinguished Service Order. It was some really great honor. And C.S. lewis actually took. Refused it just because he didn't want to be seen as affiliated with any political party.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. But it was. I think it was largely as a result of CS Lewis's broadcast talks during the war, which I really did a lot for national morale, I guess, at that particular moment, and were hugely popular.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Wow, that is fascinating.

[Cindy Rollins]

Maybe we should start calling him Sir C.S. lewis.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, I call him Saint Jack and Saint Louis. I've got a. Yeah, I've got a few different versions, but yeah, exactly. Hi.

[House of Humane Letters Announcer]

Hope you're Enjoying today's best of episode. Let me just quickly tell you what we've got going on this summer at House of Humane Letters. All of our offerings are available live or later. So if you missed what we had going on in May or June, it's not too late. You can grab those videos even now. In May, we had a fantastic webinar on Mary Poppins where our instructor showed us that Mary Poppins is misunderstood, understood, because we do not approach her through the lens of the literary tradition that actually Mary Poppins, rather than being an ordinary English governess, is part Celtic Fae, part goddess. Not to be missed. In June we had a mini class by Jen Rogers on the Chronicles of Narnia called A Complete Transmutation. This was a fantastic mini class. It was seven sessions which you can purchase in our store right now. And she takes a look at the Chronicles of Narnia as a whole. We get into all, all the background of C.S. lewis as a literary scholar, the medieval imagination, and she shows us how reading these books actually helps us to have a medieval imagination ourselves that we, like the characters in the book, go through a complete transmutation as we read. Also available in our store now in July, we've got, coming up, a mini class on Shakespeare. This one's called Players on a Cosmic the Grammar of Nature in Shakespeare. This is going to meet on Mondays, Wednesday and Friday nights for two weeks in July. July 6 through July 17 at 7pm Eastern. Ms. Ella Hornstra is going to be taking us through the nature imagery in King Lear, A Winter's Tale and the Tempest. And if you caught her earlier webinars on how to read the Symbolism of Nature, you are going to love this Shakespeare class as well. Now, as we move into August, Addison Hornstra is going to be doing a webinar on Chinese folklore. It's called what Became of the Weaving Ma Spindle, An Introduction to Chinese Folklore. We are moving that from a July date to August 3rd at 7pm and you can register for that now. And bringing up the rear, I will be continuing my series on Harry Potter on Mondays in August. August 10th through August 31st at 6pm I'm going to be teaching Harry Potter, Gateway to the literary tradition. And we are going to be taking a look at the Half Blood Prince. And it's been really important to me that I don't keep repeating myself in these classes. So this is not going to be everything I said in the first two classes yet for this book this time. Each class I try to show us how these books are a Door to a whole new area of the literary tradition that we will learn all about a new universe in this class together. So we'll go deeper into some of the things we already talked about and we'll cover some new ground as well. So I'm really looking forward to that again. Houseofhumaneletters.com you can buy all of these live or later. And now back to our show.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, my commonplace quote. So I'm teaching Paradise Lost right now and I've been reading a bunch of essays on that. And Samuel Johnson, our writer of the day here, has an essay on Milton and Paradise Lost. So this is in, from his book the Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets. And we're going to talk about who Samuel Johnson is as a writer. Why he's somebody we talk about and remember. So in this volume, of course, he writes about the poet. So this is, I was reading what he had to say about Milton and in this, Samuel Johnson gives us his. He starts off saying, this is my definition of poetry. And then he judges Milton on the basis of that. And when I got to that in the reading, I immediately ran over to Mr. Banks and read it to him and said, this is such a neoclassical definition. And since today I want us to talk about Samuel Johnson and the neoclassicists and what they were all about and the influence that they had on writing and thinking, I thought I'd share this quote because I don't know that I actually agree with it. So here it is. Here's Samuel Johnson's definition of poetry from his essay on Milton in his Lives of the Eminent English Poets, which he wrote in 1783. Poetry is the art of uniting pleasure with truth by calling imagination to the help of reason. That is such a neoclassical definition.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think the neoclassical tone of it shines out mostly in the second half. The second half calling imagination to the helper. So imagination is kind of the handmaid to reason, who is the queen.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes. Oh absolutely.

[Cindy Rollins]

Uh huh.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

The same thing. And the uniting pleasure with truth. So I don't think for Sam, Samuel Johnson believes, as Mr. Banks was telling me this morning, Right. You have to have a grave moral seriousness, a moral purpose to your writing. Now that's one of the reasons why the neoclassical writers tended toward the didactic. And some of those novels of that period are unbearable because they're sermons. Right?

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Samuel Richardson writes a thousand pages to tell us girls, don't be seduced. It's very didactic. So it's not that I think that poetry is not true. I Believe it is true, capital T. But the fact that he thinks the goal of the poet is to present truth and to bring pleasure in the truth or to make truth pleasing and that you're primarily using the vehicle of reason. But yeah, like you said, imagination is the handmade. Now the Romantics are going to have a lot to say about that. But yeah, so it strikes me as just. This really shows the neoclassical view. It's very moralistic, didactic, clear, concise. You have to have a clear moral purpose, clearly stated. And again, it's not that I think poetry has to be a lie, but what do you do? What do you do with a landscape painting? Where's the truth in that? That's just beautiful. Right? What's the didactic truth? I should say, what's the moral of it?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that's really interesting because when you say neoclassical just for our listeners, that. That's like saying Greek. That's Greek to me. I have no vision of what you're saying, but I'm trying now. I'm piecing it together by what you're saying.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Okay, so you have the classical period and then you have the medieval period. And then in the Renaissance you have the rebirth of Greek and Roman thinking. But the Renaissance itself continues to be very medieval in its understanding, so very much valued of the imagination and metaphor and poetic thinking and the kinds of things that Lewis talks about in the discarded image. After the Renaissance comes the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment then very, very deliberately rejects anything that's not quote unquote classical. Okay, so they have a full scale revolt against the medieval everything. Shakespeare falls out of the neoclassical poet critics. Okay, so during the Enlightenment, the writers were called neoclassical writers. So the enlightened period is called the Neoclassical period. Also the Augustan Age.

[Cindy Rollins]

They're.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

But you can see why Augustine, like Caesar Augustus. Right, so it's all the same thing. It's all neoclassical. We're the new Greeks. Okay, well that's, that's a humble title. What kind of poet are you? I'm a new Homer. The Neo Homers. All right, well, yes, like the war

[Angelina Stanford]

of the ancients and the moderns, which is a product of this era.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right, exactly. Jonathan Swift. So the. So the Enlightenment writers elevate reason over everything, really to, to the point of insanity. So only those things that can be reasoned and logic. This is when you see Deism as a religion take off. In other words, all of the mysterious, transcendent, illogical, unreasonable aspects of Christianity are denied. Right. And so Deism becomes the religion of the day. It's Christianity minus the miracles. It's this, this logic, hyper rationalist approach to everything. And so where medieval art was mysterious and had multiple layers of meaning and allegory on purpose and kind of shifts and moves with you, neoclassical storytelling and poetry is, well, they had. They took the Greek ideal of clarity and simplicity. And so everything is very, very clearly and didactically stated. He goes on to say in this essay that a poet has to have a moral right, and it needs to be clearly stated so that no one can miss it. So all that ambiguity of the Middle Ages, we want things clearly stated, clearly affirmed. No mistake about it.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's almost like the moral is. The moral is the medicine you're drinking and the story is only the vessel that carries it, kind of.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or the honey to gild the pill. Right?

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And so the response to the. So this is your. This is your Addison, this is your Alexander Pope, this is your Jonathan Swift, this is, this is your Samuel Johnson, John Dryden, all of these guys. And you know, as my favorite Shakespeare critic Harold Goddard says, he always points out to the fact that the neoclassical writers hated Shakespeare. They all hated Shakespeare. They liked Ben Jonson. Why? Because Ben Jonson followed the classical Aristotelian rules of drama and Shakespeare did not. Right? So Shakespeare falls out of fashion. All this stuff, as Harold Goddard says, all that proves is that only the imagination can apprehend the imagination. Right? So the neoclassicists could not perceived the brilliance of Shakespeare because they were operating out of an entirely different paradigm, a faulty paradigm, I think. And so you end up with poems, okay, called essays. Alexander, Paul, An Essay on Man, An Essay on Criticism, like he's writing poetic essays, right? You see how different that is? It's not about creating a mood and a world to enter and a mystery to sit in. It's a didactic sermon brought to you in verse.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay? Right, Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Only one clear meaning. A little learning is a dangerous thing. That is very clear. It's like reading prose. It doesn't even sound like a poem.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

That's from Alexander Pope's essay on man, the point of which was stay in your lane. That's why I was actually making the stay in your lane joke at the beginning because we covered this in my. In my Milton class this week. But so the neoclassicists, they're in fashion for a while now, interestingly enough. And this will not surprise you when you have a hyper rationalist cosmology, okay, the form, then the preferred form for fiction becomes not a surprise, the satire, because all we do is make fun of everything. Right. So the mock heroic epic, the mock this, the mock that, it's satire. Because now they're in this position where all we can do is make fun of everything in this didactic way.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mm.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

After the neoclassicist comes the Romantic period, and they react. They react to the neoclassicists. They say, no, no, no, no. Imagination is a very important thing. Don't cast imagination aside. The neoclassicists thought imagination was suspicious, faulty, that, you know, we can just reason our way to these things. And the Romantics argue for a return for multiple meanings and allegory, ambiguity in words and poetry. So you end up with Keats writing poems about knight errants wandering around a forest, and you're like, what is happening? You never read a neoclassical poem and say, what is happening? You know exactly what is happening. They want to make sure that, you know, because you don't miss the point.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So, yeah. So it's an elevation of reason above all things, a rational universe where things can be understood. So now, that's not to say that some good things didn't come out of the neoclassical period. They did. And I actually really like Sam Wood Johnson. He's hilariously funny, for one thing, in his satire, and you get some pretty funny satires, but that was the mood of the day. So for him, the definition of poetry was didactic. He even goes on to say in the essay that, you know, the first job of the poet is to have a moral. Yeah. You know, when you study these periods, you watch the pendulum swing. You watch the pendulum swing. The Renaissance was a period of really wrestling through education theory, and it ended up on the side of elevating reason to a place where it couldn't stay. And so then the Romantics come around and say, you know what, guys? No. All this hyper focus on rationalism took God out of the equation.

[Cindy Rollins]

So if we're educating our children or if we're educators, or we're educating ourselves, which is what we're all about, and we. And we put a label on ourselves, then we are kind of missing a whole cool, broad scope of information that we could have from other people who. If we say, for instance, if we say, well, we're classical educators, where are we gonna plop down in the middle of all that? You know, we're gonna. Are we gonna be neoclassical? Are we gonna go back to the Rome? And people have been haggling with this. Whereas this is where Charlotte Mason comes in and she just says that we're learning. You Know, we're going to give living ideas to our children. And guess what? That's going to cover this classical period. It's going to cover this neoclassical period, it's going to cover the Romantics and on and on and on. And we don't have to haggle over what the meaning of the word classical is.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, absolutely. And you know, to me, nothing points out the absurdity of being stuck on labels and the fact that you have to say I hate Shakespeare or Shakespeare's a failure because he wasn't quote unquote classical. I mean, boy, talk about something beside the point. Who cares? History has judged that no one cares whether or not Shakespeare followed the Aristotelian unities. Right? He had a genius of the imagination and we appreciate it. I tend to take a long view of these things. I'm fascinated with the way that ideas move and the pendulum swings as people struggle with trying to figure out what is truth and how can you perceive it. It's not wrong that during the Enlightenment there was incredible discovery. New worlds are being discovered, scientific discoveries, the telescope, everything is changing. And that was good. It's good to know the creation. It's good to, you know, observe and have empirical evidence. None of those things are wrong. And we've had wonderful advancements through that. Okay? But the problem comes when the pendulum swings too far, when we think we can know everything. And so then we put ourselves above God and we say, well, miracles are irrational. So obviously whatever move the mystery room

[Cindy Rollins]

remove and wonder and we have to have it back.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Our spirits can't survive the pendulum swings back again. And that tension between the neoclassical period and how they sort of got intoxicated with how much they could know. And then the romantic response to that is so apropos, I think, to our own time. We're in a hyper rationalist, scientific time. We scoff at the idea of mystery or the miraculous or the supernatural, and we have elevated reason to a place it cannot stay. And obviously then our souls are so hungry for mystery and the supernatural. That's why I think. I think this is why when you turn on the TV, I mean, it's 500 shows about ghosts and psychics. And you know, we're bombarded with the supernatural because we've shut it out of our lives.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And people will believe in it. You just cannot as humans.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's very difficult not to believe in something inexplicable.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And, you know, and I don't want to belabor the definition of poetry here, I just think it's an example of the pendulum swinging a little too far in that direction. The first job of the poet is to have a moral. And the whole.

[Angelina Stanford]

The whole.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

The whole poem then, is to support the moral. That's crazy. That's not what poetry is for at all. Or even, like Tom was saying, that imagination becomes the handmaiden of reason was, you know, kind of a little embarrassing. Stepsister, that would. The only reason you would want the imagination, it's because it helps you to think. Right. That would be his. Now, in this, he was actually being more kind than some of the other neoclassical writers who despised any view of the imagination or fancy. He's actually, I think, trying to have a place for it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right. Because he was a delightful person who wasn't a Milton, who you felt like was just very stern, and I mean not to.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And Samuel Johnson was wickedly funny, as most of these guys were.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And what. And would you say Keats is answering this when he says, truth is beauty and beauty is truth. Is that.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes, absolutely. That's absolutely. What's all these guys? Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats. Later on, Byron and Shelley. Shelley, in his defense of Posey, Coleridge and all of his work on the poetic imagination. Jump in at any point here, Tom, I know you have.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was thinking. I mean, you quoted that. That Johnson passage from his essay on Paradise Lost, and Paradise Lost, if I remember, is. I mean, he's willing to give it a very, very high place, as obviously it deserves in English poetry, but he seems kind of hesitant to do so because he's not sure exactly what, you know, the moral significance of it is. I mean, he's willing to bow down before the beauty of it. But, for instance, Johnson, who's a very staunch monarchist, a very staunch Tory, is suspicious of Milton as a man because Milton is, you know, the defender of, you know, regicide of overthrowing the king.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right, right.

[Angelina Stanford]

He says, yeah, this man is obviously a genius, but there's something about him I don't trust.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And, you know, it's funny, too. I'm scanning the essay while you're talking. I mean, this makes me want to cry. Makes my heart kind of die. So I think Paradise Lost is an absolute masterpiece. And this is how Samuel Johnson is able to praise it. Right. His purpose, Milton's was the most useful and the most arduous to the reasonableness of religion.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is sort of ridiculous. Yeah. I mean, that is almost bizarre.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

But you can see why I read that and thought, well, this is neoclassicism in a nutshell. Right. Like, well, thank God for Milton because he showed us how all reasonable it is to believe in God.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, Christians have made this mistake before. Right. We continue to make it. We continue to think, well, we just need to, you know, logically persuade people that Christianity is true. It's never a logic problem. That's the problem of belief has never been a logic problem.

[Cindy Rollins]

And yet when we make it too, like, fruity, then we have to get hat. We have to throw in some.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yep.

[Cindy Rollins]

To go back to the logic a little bit.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

The pendulum swings. Right. Because we can make it too feely, loosey, goosey. My personal walk with Jesus. And people get the impression you got to leave your brain at the door. So, yes, the pendulum swings.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. It's just like everything I always say, I just fall off the horse one side, get back up and fall off the other. I don't really know. Right there. Yeah. So here we are, let's. Moving on to more of Samuel Johnson.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

That's a little introduction to Samuel Johnson there.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah, very helpful.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I would love it if we could because I know you're a great lover of Samuel Johnson. I know Thomas. Tom, can you. Could you give us a little context, a little more? So we've covered the neoclassics, but Samuel Johnson was the man.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. I mean, he was known as, I think his unofficial title, the Great Sham of English Literature. So Johnson's opinion and a lot of it, a lot of his authority, I think had to do with, I mean, the way he used language in his writings, in his conversation. I mean, he was. There was something about him that, I guess you could say a natural weightiness. One of those people you hesitate to disagree with even when he. He's obviously wrong. Whether he's right or wrong, he always has kind of the note of authority he became. I mean, he's probably best known for his dictionary. And that was kind of an impressive labor by itself because it was mostly a one man job. I mean, compiling a dictionary that was not just supposed to function as a lexicon, but also as kind of a standard of how the language should be used? So he was always looking one of his canons of literary greatness. He's always asking, does this work advance the language? Does this serve to make English a nobler thing than it was before? And that shows up in a lot of his critical writings. And he also, the sheer breadth of his work is also really impressive. I mean, he began as when he was a young man. He came down from Litchfield to London and became a hack writer in Grub Street. So what we would now call kind of a low end journalist. Amongst other things, he sometimes, to pay the rent, he would write sermons for pastors who were too late to write their own. Actually there is a volume in, I think it's the Christian Classic series. I can't remember the publisher, but it's of the sermons Johnson wrote that he himself didn't deliver. Some of them are actually really good and. Yeah, and at the same time he was a poet. He wrote satirical poetry of the kind you mentioned. The vanity of human wishes is probably

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

the most famous, very strong didactic purpose. Right. To show you the vanity of human desires.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, the vanity of human desires. Of the desire for greatness, of ambition and of place seeking. And it's a sententious poem, but it is really quite good in a lot of ways.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

If we could just go back to the dictionary for a second. What strikes me is that Samuel Johnson's dictionary is a perfect example of sort of the best and the worst of neoclassicism. Like it's good to have standardized definitions and spellings, which up until that point they didn't have. But you can also see that how that would have come out of that neoclassical impulse. Right. To have a clear, precise definition that everybody's following, take away the ambiguity.

[Cindy Rollins]

Did he finish the dictionary or did he not finish it?

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it was, it was published

[Cindy Rollins]

in his lifetime, but he was continually working on it anyway.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that was, that was kind of his. That was kind of his magnum opus. Some of the definitions I just make for a laugh now. It's. For instance, he defines the word monsieur as a term of contempt used amongst Frenchmen.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's a monument of learning and also of ignorance. I mean, it's brilliant. And also laugh.

[Cindy Rollins]

His prejudices seep in. Definitely.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it was. Yeah, he was. One of his comments to Boswell, at some point they're discussing their mutual friend. I think it's discussing their mutual friend Edmund Burke, who was Irish. And Johnson says the Irish are an honest people for they never speak well of one another.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like Paul, all creepy.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

He also had a wonderful self deprecating sensation. Humor though. I want to make sure our listeners don't think, oh, Sam, Johnson's just full. He's. No, he was really, really an interesting guy and super influential. I can't remember who he was walking with. I feel like I'm gonna tell this story and Tom's gonna know exactly who I'm talking about. But he was famously walking along the, the London Bridge one day and on One side of the London Bridge is the, the, the busts of the head of the greatest men of England. And on the other side of the London Bridge is where they would,

[Cindy Rollins]

they

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

would stick the heads of criminals.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh yeah, traitors and all of that.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yeah. So they're walking along and his friend, who's also a literary man, points to the busts on one side and says, Samuel Johnson, one day our heads may be amongst these. And without missing a beat, Samuel Johnson pointed to the other side of the bridge and said, or that side.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it also illustrates kind of the 18th century search for good sense at the cost of anything else. Where. So he was great friends with James Boswell. And James Boswell, who's a Scotsman, has kind of a romantic streak. He was interested in highland culture and had sort of a romantic longing for lost causes and things like that. He admired Rousseau and one time when he and Johnson were touring the Hebrides together, they heard someone playing a bagpipe. And Boswell says, when I hear music like that, it makes me want to don the tartan and rush off into battle. And Johnson, again without missing a beat, says, sir, I should not think of listening to it if it made me act like such a fool.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

That's a perfect segue to this essay. Johnson, obviously not pro war now. Hi, me again. I already told you about our summer

[House of Humane Letters Announcer]

classes, but I simply cannot contain myself. And I must tell you about some really special treats we have coming up this school year. We have two semester long classes by visiting professors. In the fall we've got a fantastic class by Dr. Jason Baxter. If you read why Literature Still Matters and you thought, yes, you have convinced me, the literary life is for me. Where do I start? He designed this class for you. It's called Where Do We Go From Here? Reading for Life. This is going to be a six week long class, potentially 12 weeks. You can, you can take six weeks of lectures or you can have the six week add on for some discussion with Dr. Baxter about some scholarly articles getting really deeper into this stuff. But he's going to take us through myth, epic, tragedy, comedy, lyric poetry and the novel and help us to understand how to approach reading for life. Again, that's on Tuesdays, starting in the fall. Now, in the spring of 2027, having yet another pinch me moment, we've got Dr. Michael Drought, who has just topped the charts with his new book on Tolkien called the Tower and the Ruin. And he is giving us a class on the works of Tolkien on Thursdays from January to May, the spring Semester coming up, he's going to be leading us in a class called Tolkien's Creation. Not only is he going to cover the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion, he's going to get into things like Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Pearl and all of the works that make up Tolkien's imagination and Tolkien's creation. This is the same class that he teaches at a university and we are offering it for pennies and anybody can take it. There's no written work. We have found that literally everyone from 12 years old to 78 is in that class and having the time of their lives. So Dr. Baxter in the fall, Dr. Drought in the spring. I'm just too excited to be able to offer these top notch teachers to you guys for a low, low cost. Houseofhumaneletters.com register.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Now, Interestingly, this. So we talked about Addison and the Spectator and the Rattler. Johnson had his own writing club, literary club.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Which included the likes of, as you said, Edmund Burke, the painter, Joshua Reynolds, Boswell. Who else was in that?

[Angelina Stanford]

The actor, let me see. The actor David Garrick, who was probably the best English actor of his day and yeah, considered the best interpreter of Shakespeare on the stage.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was Oliver Goldsmith. Part of that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, Oliver Goldsmith, the victor of Wakefield

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

and of course had the very original name of the club.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes. And it even had. And here's aiming high. It even had its Latin motto, Esto perpetua, May it be forever.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

They'd hang out in coffee houses.

[Cindy Rollins]

This is the pre inkling Inklings.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes. No, very much so. Very much so. They've been called that before. So Samuel Johnson wrote essays. I was actually reading about this this morning that apparently I strongly related to the. He was writing so much and would have deadlines looming over them that sometimes he'd whip out an article 30 minutes before it was due. Just one draft. One draft, Are you kidding? That's how brilliant he was though, that he could put that out.

[Angelina Stanford]

His one novel, Rozellus, which is an Easter tale. He wrote the novel in the course of a week because his mother had died and he couldn't afford a coffin. So he needed to sell some piece of writing so he could afford to give her a proper funeral. And he wrote this novel in a week.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, my kids, because of Dr. Grant, George Grant, read that in high school. I did not read it, but that was assigned to them as part of their King's Meadow studies.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Do they like it?

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, they seem to. Nobody complained about it. It's short. So, you know.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right. It's very, very short.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's like Egyptian or something, isn't it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Ethiopian.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, Ethiopian. Okay.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's kind of f. Imagined Ethiopia. It's the story of Razelas, who is a young Ethiopian prince who is sort of overcome with melancholy and thinks that there must be something more to life than, you know, living. Living a life of luxury. So he, his tutor and his younger sister wander off in the quest for wisdom. And they seek out wisdom in, you know, is it living a life of action and service to one's fellow men? Is it living a life of contemplation as a hermit in the desert? And they realize that none of these. These means of seeking illumination is a. I guess you could say a silver bullet to attaining it. And it ends with. The final chapter is entitled the Conclusion, in which nothing is concluded, wisdom is worth seeking. But, I mean, perhaps in this fallen world that we live in, we're never quite sure of holding onto it permanently and making it an inescapable possession. It's an interesting book, Very melancholy, but it's.

[Cindy Rollins]

I guess if his mother just.

[Angelina Stanford]

I would recommend it. Yeah.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, the thing about Samuel Johnson that always fascinated me is that on the one hand, right, he's the model of good sense. We're good sense. We're reasonable people. We're gonna do reasonable things. And yet he struggled his entire life with horrible depression and melancholy. May have been bipolar. He famously, when he felt a mood coming on him, he would ask his friends to chain him up so that he could not harm himself until the mood had passed.

[Angelina Stanford]

Also suffered from Tourette's. It wasn't called that at the time, but he had odd facial takes. I mean, he was. It was, I think, a strange experience to be in his company because, yeah, he kind of odd. Random verbal outbursts. I mean, not like profanity, as we associate, but. Yeah. What we now call Tourette's. I think he suffered from that.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow. He might. May have accidentally been witty sometime, perhaps.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So this essay was part of a series he did that later got compiled into a book called the Idler. This was number 22, and it was published serially, as so many things were at the time. Later on, they were compiled into book. So, you know, newspapers is the big thing in the neoclassical period. Right. It's like, you know, looking at your news feed and seeing the news of the day. Everybody would get the newspaper and go to the coffee shop. So Addison is writing in various publications and so Samuel Johnson. So these were called the Idler. This was number 22. Later on, when he compiled these for a book, he left this essay out. I think this is really interesting because the publishers felt that the anti war satire was too seditious.

[Angelina Stanford]

This was written during the Seven Years War, or right around that time, I think, 1750s.

[Cindy Rollins]

What was the Seven Years War?

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, I mean, to us Americans, I mean, the French and Indian War.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's right. It's the.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

It played out on the European theater.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. It had theaters of action in India, Europe and the Americas, with the British, the Perussians, the Austrians, the French, all as players in this war over the balance of power. I guess you would say. Johnson didn't think the British government really had any reason to be engaging in this war, which was, from his perspective, mostly fought to support their Prussian ally. And he thought it waste of a waste of life, essentially. I mean, interesting. Johnson was himself obviously not a militarist. He wasn't really a pacifist either. I mean, he famously says, every man feels meanly about himself for not having served in the army or not having been at sea. But, yeah, wars of imperial expansion, he thought were a fool's errand.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And some of these wars. So he wasn't anti war necessarily, but he was definitely anti this war. And he could. He was very. And pointing out what was actually going on in this essay, which. Using the vulture as a theme.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, it's so brilliant. And of course, I immediately thought, this is the same sort of structure that we saw in Joseph Adamson's essay.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

We've got the LA frame and then the kind of fictional allegory.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. We start out with just. Yeah. And then we have a little story that's thrown in. Yes. And that story is the point. Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yeah. I realized I used a literary term without defining it. So a frame. A literary frame is just like a frame in a painting.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

It's the thing that kind of goes around it. And so a framing device is anything that's right before the story. Like, so a character saying, I once had a dream or I found this book in the attic and this was the story it told. There's always some kind of framing device. It's usually at the beginning and end, but not always. It doesn't always come back at the end. It doesn't in this case. So we've got the beginning where he seems to be talking about, you know, and can animals speak?

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I thought.

[Cindy Rollins]

Was it. Was it going to be. Be a linguistic kind of thing where we talk about languages, but, no, we were not going to be talking about languages and.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Funny, though, right, that he's. It's. It's kind of a fanciful essay. I mean, it's. It's, again, it's a satire.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's like a fable. Yes, it's almost a.

[Angelina Stanford]

It's almost. This is something you can read a child.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So it's, again, has a very clear moral, not ambiguous at all, not multiple layers of meaning. That's not how these guys were.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's just a story, a straightforward story with a straightforward moral.

[Angelina Stanford]

And something about Johnson's pessimism as regards human nature. I mean, he's very much a part of the Enlightenment, but at the same time, like Jonathan Swift, capable of sitting back and examining its ideals with an eye of suspicion. I mean, he didn't think necessarily that, well, technological progress, whether in military affairs or other areas, was an unqualified good. There's always the side of his thinking that says, well, any device, any invention that makes human beings stronger, more powerful, gives them some conquest over nature that's not necessarily going to be used for the betterment of either the human race or of creation. I mean, in Rosella, there's a passage where two characters are talking about, what if some device enabled men to fly like birds? And one of them starts saying, well, hey, that would be. That would be a wonderful thing. Imagine, you know, human communication being opened up so that men of one country could. Could communicate more easily with men of another. And another says this. If men were all virtuous, said the artist, I would with great alacrity teach them all to fly. But what would be the security of the good if the bad could at pleasure invade them from the sky against an army sailing through the clouds? Neither walls, nor mountains nor seas could afford any security. Even this valley, the retreat of princes, the abode of happiness, might be violated by the sudden descent of some of the naked nations that swarm on the coast of the southern sea. So, no, I mean, yeah, I mean, it's kind of prophetic in a way. 150 years before the Wright brothers and, you know, slightly more than 100.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

This is so much like Jonathan Swift.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very much.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

This could be a scene in Gulliver's

[Angelina Stanford]

Travels, which is the floating island again, in Gulliver's Travel.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, right. That's book three.

[Angelina Stanford]

Is that Laputa?

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes. And the island pushes them and they have all these weapons. And I feel like I may have, you know, kind of turned everybody's stomach against the Neoclassicists But I'm so glad you brought this up. Many of the writers, Jonathan Swift, very much so, and Johnson as well, are using their satire to satirize their own movement, their own time that they're in. Jonathan Swift, for one, is constantly saying, listen, I know all this new technological and scientific discovery is awesome, but slow down caution, we might be going over the cliff here. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

So

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

these men are not blind to the potential dangers here of if the pendulum should swing too far.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think we should talk about satire for a second. Maybe we don't have a whole lot of time, but.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Okay, go ahead.

[Cindy Rollins]

There's a good. We have to have satire and it's so helpful to us, and yet there is the danger that it would go too far. I feel like we all, every culture, every society needs some satire.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

But yet there is also the point where if we become too satirical, we become bitter. And I know Swift is, you know, accused of being bitter, a bitter person, but yet we can't. We really need that in our culture. In some ways.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

No, agreed. I mean, I like about this period that they can make fun of themselves.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I guess. And that's like, say something really off the wall like the Babylon be, which is making fun of Christians, but they are Christians. And, you know, yeah, we can laugh at that because we are that. That is us. You know, we do, we. We do feel bad on Sunday when we can't go to check Chick Fil A. And, you know, it's. We need someone to tweak us like that.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

When I think what you're getting at too, is the two different types of satire, the Horatian satire and the Juvenilian satire. And we just happen to have a class. This is right next to me. Would you define those terms for us?

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah, the names the Horatian and the Juvenalian satire come from two of the Roman poets, Horace and Juvenal, who both wrote satire. Horatian satire is good natured ribbing, basically. It's friendly mockery. It's the kind. I would say PG Wodehouse is an example of Horatian satire. Bertie the Drones Club, the young aristocrats who are at the center of his stories. They're all ridiculous. We see their ridiculousness constantly, but it doesn't seem like he wants them to disappear, to be changed, really. Or he takes their existence for granted and is happy for it. He's happy to laugh at them, invite us to join in laughing at them, but not to hate them. We don't hate Bertie. We kind of like him, actually, even though. Though he's a good natured idiot. Juvenalian satire. So that's Jonathan Swift. That's satire that wishes the subject ill, I suppose. Man, I'm trying to think of. So Jonathan Swift. What's another example of a satire like angry satire? Maybe Evelyn Waugh. Sometimes I think Evelyn Waugh would call for some of his. Some of his novels, like Vile Bodies, because Evelyn Waugh is also living in the 1920s, 1930s, who was part of the Bright Young Things circle. And he came really to hate this and just see it as decadent and shiny nihilism.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And Swift's A Modest Proposal would definitely be 2 million satire.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, that's kind of the.

[Cindy Rollins]

So that's where. Okay, so that's where he gets his bitter label from the. Yeah.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right. So he's. Now, of course, his point was that he was trying to show that English law was eating the Irish alive. So, you know, he's got a really intense purpose there. But I completely agree with you that we need satire. A culture has gone horribly wrong when it can't laugh at itself.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

You're absolutely right. Because, like, the medieval perspective is that laughter is what brings us back into proportion with ourselves. So when we've gotten out of proportion, we need to laugh at ourselves. Right? As the kids today would say, you need to get over yourself. So we laugh, laugh, and now we've restored proportion. So satire that calls you back to having properly ordered loves like you've. Let's make fun of art. You know, the. Always share with my students the YouTube video that's mocking the Christian Instagram devotional photo. Like, you know, it's. And we all laugh at ourselves and realize, okay, you're right. It's really, you know, we should be actually talking to God and not worried about staging the perfect photo. That's light satire that calls us back to, you know, how we should actually be. And. But the pendulum can go too far, like you say. And I kind of feel like we're in this place right now where we have just adopted this posture of mocking everything because we don't love anything. It's not calling us back to good loves. We don't love anything.

[Cindy Rollins]

Mock. We become mockers. Maybe. Maybe we move from satire to mock mockery. And that. That would.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, and debunkers. That's the phrase.

[Cindy Rollins]

You are bonkers. Yes. Yes. And I. And the reason I'm so sensitive to that term, debunk, and why I recognize it is because I tend to be A debunker. And I feel like I had to learn that as a parent that I was debunking things and I was creating a lack of reverence in my children. And. Yeah, you know, that wasn't going to put them. You know, if it's so easy to make fun of people and so easy to make fun of things, also easy to make. To not reverence anything, to see the ugly side of everything, because pretty much all of us as humans have an ugly side also. And instead of being respectful and honoring when we can. So I really, really related to what CS Lewis said there about debunking to be. Debunking is a word that, you know, I use as a warning word in my own life because I do so enjoy satire.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Oh, I do too. I do too. And so you've got the kind of light irony of Jane Eyre. I mean, Jane Austen. I mean, Jane Austen, Right. So she's got that light satirical touch. I don't have a ton of light satire. What we do. I mean, I guess Babylon Be would be an example of light satire. Yeah, we have a lot of mocking.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you see Garrison Keillor as somebody on the. On the. Straddling the. That line where I think there was a sense where he started out as a light satirist and ended up as a mocker. The bitterness of his own experience seemed to take over, in my opinion. Obviously this is, you know, modern living author, but he becomes a little acidic, I guess, as he goes. But he starts out very light and funny where you, as a Christian, you can laugh at his jokes, at Christians, because they're so tricky.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So how would we characterize the satire in this essay?

[Angelina Stanford]

I think it's pretty dark. I wouldn't call this a light hearted piece of writing at all. Especially kind of, it exposes the sheer wickedness of the things that human beings are capable of doing to each other by showing it in a light that makes it irrational. Because you have the vulture asking. So hold on, let me find the passage. When men have killed their prey, said the pupil, that is the young vulture, why do they not eat it? When the wolf has killed a sheep, he suffers not the vulture to touch it till he satisfied himself. Man said, the mother is the only beast who kills that which he does not devour. And this quality makes him so much a benefactor to our species.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I thought that him putting in the vulture. Well, initially it's just the narrative pose of confusion.

[House of Humane Letters Announcer]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And so they have a conversation to explain what's going on, but then he Shifts it and gives the vultures the morally superior position.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah. So the vultures in this are more humane than the people.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I would only kill something to eat it. It doesn't make sense.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. We look at it as. Yeah, we start out with vulture negative, but we find out that it's not the vulture who is negative, it's the man who is negative.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right. There's nothing unnatural about the behavior of the vult, but the humans killing each other, that's unnatural.

[Angelina Stanford]

And even in all the language that they use to describe the man, make the man sound kind of like another sort of animal.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

They come together in a herd.

[Angelina Stanford]

Man will sometimes, replied the mother, remain for a long time quiet in his den, like he's a vulture of some kind, and then goes out, for some reason, which we don't understand, to kill and be killed.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. So, yeah. So that's the conversation between the two vultures. And then it ends with a kind of interesting.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So then he says, why are they doing this? What's. You know. And she says, well, if you've lived long enough, the old vultures have noticed these patterns of when they're quiet and when the herd of mutual slaughter happens.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. And then they say, there's always somebody. So this is a very short essay.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Very, very short. But it packs a punch.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Because I feel like at the end, he's really trying to make. Where he said there's always someone that entitles him. Just. We don't know what entitles this person to such preeminence, but he seems to take the most pleasure in what is happening.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And that's probably where they thought it got seditious because he's.

[Cindy Rollins]

He must be pointing to someone in particular.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

He's saying, the problem here is not the men, it's the leaders who are obviously taking delight in this. That's the only explanation. Right. From the vulture's perspective, they must be delighting in stirring up this slaughter. Nothing else makes sense because the vultures can't perceive any good outcome. Just that they meet for no reason and kill each other and then walk away.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, absolutely. So, yeah. And when you get to that point, you do. And then it takes you back to The World War I poets at that point, and the bitterness of war and being. The bitterness of being set up by your leaders to be slaughtered.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Reason.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Like Gallipoli. Have you ever seen that movie that. I can't. I still. It's been like 15 years. I'm still traumatized by that movie.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I can't watch Gallipoli I mean, I

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

had to walk away. It was so horrific.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I mean it's a terrible chapter in history altogether. Just all. And the fact that Winston Churchill himself, I mean, it's amazing that he recovered from Gallipoli. I mean, I mean there's a lot of historical notes about Gallipoli where he's blamed for it as the what? The Admiral. The admiral. The Admiralty.

[Angelina Stanford]

Lord of the Admiralty.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. But you know, there's also some things where, you know, they didn't do it the way he told them to do it. So he's not completely. But a lot of people, he did take the fall for it. And so it's amazing that he ever recovered from such a terrible battle politically.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yeah, right. And so then Johnson ends the essay saying that these people, these leaders who obviously delight in this are a friend to the vultures.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Because they're helping them out. Yeah. They're giving them something to eat. Well, I have this little story which is a little bit. It reminds this. The vulture reminded me of this little light hearted story in a book that we always read aloud to our kids called Bird Life in Wington by J. Calvin Reed. These are morality tales using birds. And one of the stories is about a hunter hawk and a vulture. And the hawk and the vulture are talking to each other like the two vultures are in this story. Now the hawk is very anxious, he's hungry, he wants to eat and he wants to go out and kill his prey. And they're both sitting like on a wire and down below him is a fence. And the vulture said, no, I don't like to go out. Now this is putting the vulture in a little different light than this story. But in the nature of birds, a hawk kills its prey, but a vulture actually waits for the death. It eats dead things, it doesn't kill things. So the hawk says, I'm just gonna go out and get my food. And the vulture says, well, why don't you just wait and God will provide. And the hawk says no. And so the hawk goes down, is about to grab this little bird on a fence post and instead impales himself on the fence post. Now this is a children's story, believe it or not. And then the vulture flies down and says, oh look, God provided me with a meal and he eats the hawk. So it's best to wait on the Lord. He always provides. Now there is a morality tale about. I think that would class. I think the neoclassical classicists would enjoy that story.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

I think so, yes. What is Samuel Johnson calling us Back to. With this satire. I mean, you said he's not a pacifist. This is the context of the Seven Years War. So I'm thinking that he's putting this in the overall context of even like the Hundred Years War. It's been like eternal fighting between France and England.

[Cindy Rollins]

But he doesn't like the French at all. He certainly has his own cultures.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right, but I like.

[Cindy Rollins]

Of the French.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

No, of course, of course. But, but I think that he would look at. We've, We've. We've killed each other for 100 years. What on earth have we accomplished?

[Cindy Rollins]

I think he's, he's trying to. I think it's recognition. He wants people to at least see what is going on and, and I

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

think to hold the leaders accountable. I mean, so by the time you get to the Seven Years War, now we have these big European population getting into wars on the global scale. So this is a precursor in a lot of ways to what's going to happen in World War I, because they're all trying to expand their empires into the new World and that's causing new wars again, over what? Land boundaries, natural resources, wealth. I mean, it's not like anyone's country's been invaded and they're protecting their home. This is about imperialism. People are dying to bring wealth to the crown.

[Angelina Stanford]

Sorry, go ahead, Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

No, no, no, no, no. I was going to move it away from that. So you go ahead.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was going to say, as for Johnson's attitude towards governments, I mean, well, he's not an anarchist or anything like that. I mean, he was actually in some ways very conservative, like I said, a monarchist. But he didn't think that. He didn't expect much wisdom from any kind of government, and he didn't think that statecraft was. Was the area of human affairs where men's mind tended to exercise itself with the most wisdom. He famously says it's in one of his poems, how few of all the ills that human hearts endure the part that kings or laws can cause or cure. So people under a monarchy will tend to be about as happy as people under a republic or under an oligarchy of some kind. He says in another one of his Idler Essays, forms of government are seldom the result of much deliberation. They are formed by chance in popular assemblies or in conquered countries by despotic authority. Laws are often occasional, often capricious, made always by a few and sometimes by a single voice. And then he goes on to say, slavery is now no more patiently endured than in Countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty. So he didn't think that. Yeah. Of all the miseries that people endure simply as a natural result of being people, a great many could be cured by governments or exacerbated by them.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And that, I think, is a great example of the kind of satire we're seeing from the time. Because what happens is the Enlightenment absolutely guts Christianity. And so now you see the rise of statism and nationalism. If people can't look to God to supernaturally save them, they gotta look somewhere. So they start to look to the government. So that's of the kind. Kind of satire that we're talking about where, you know, these neoclassical writers were still able to critique their own time. And so Johnson's clearly saying, the government's not going to save you. Look elsewhere.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I mean, I think so. I think so. I think the most telling thing about this is that he did not put it in the book. That tells me that he agreed that it was maybe a little too much, that he is. He is probably patriotism pro British government. So he himself, because most writers are not so willing to take out an essay like that.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Right. It makes me wonder if these were one of those essays that he threw together really quickly because it's so short, but then later, on reflection about putting it in the book, thought twice about it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. I think he really, really firmly believed this. This is like my Facebook post. Yes. I will put up a passionate post that I later regret, but I will take it to down.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Yeah, yeah, y' all double down with a tweet about your Facebook profile.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, yeah. No doubling down. In my. In my world, I make. I may go passionate, but I will retreat.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So do you guys have any concluding remarks about this essay or Samuel Johnson or neoclassical poetry?

[Cindy Rollins]

I do not.

[Angelina Stanford]

It makes me want to pick up Boswell's life and read some chapters again.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

And we mentioned that book last on the Edison essay. So we'll mention again that Samuel Johnson spent a long time following Samuel Johnson around. Samuel Boswell? No, James Boswell. It's Friday. James Boswell followed Johnson around for a long time and then wrote the first modern biography and kind of set the form for that. That's a very famous and delightful piece of literature.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is, yeah. And Boswell himself, it's kind of interesting that he managed to write this, because when you see Boswell himself appearing in one of his books or when Johnson mentions him, he's always considered like, sort of the fun idiot who people keep around in the club.

[Cindy Rollins]

He's A bit of a buffet.

[Angelina Stanford]

Watson to the Holmes. Yeah. I mean, he was one of nature's fanboys as a young man. He was a man of means. I mean, he was, I think his father was at Scottish laird and he had means to travel on the continent. So he would go hunting around to strike up conversations with famous people. He was like, I mean, basically an autograph seeker, a stalker.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

He talks about. Oh, man. In one of his memoirs, he talks about going to visit Rousseau, Jean Jacques Rousseau of noble savage fame in Switzerland and just shows up at his house and Rousseau comes out and talks with him for a while and then says, I'm gonna leave and walks off. And it's. Yeah, that's the kind of thing that gave Boswell delight just being in the presence of the famous and the infamous.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

Well, I think this has been a delightful way to finish off our summer series on the short story and the essay. I confess that out of the three of us, I'm the least likely to read an essay. This has been a lot of fun for me to jump into these essays and to get to know these guys. I've really appreciated this summer series and I hope our listeners have as well. Cindy, you have any flash final remark about the summer series before I explain what we're going to be doing next?

[Cindy Rollins]

No, I just, I'm like you on the short story. I'm not as likely to read short stories as I am an essay. So this has been great for me too.

[Host (possibly the main narrator or moderator)]

So it stretched both of us. Well, that's fantastic. And please rate, review and subscribe if you enjoy this podcast. And a very special thanks to our Patreon subscribers who who support this podcast. And if you're interested in learning more about that, you can go to our website TheLiterary Life, or you can head over to patreon.com TheLiteraryLife and find out how you too can be part of this community of readers that we're building. So thank you so much for all of that and until next time, have a great time building 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.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.

[Thomas Banks]

A Farewell to Arms by George Peel his golden locks Time hath to silver turned O time too swift, O swiftness never ceasing his youth gainst time and age hath ever spurned, but spurned in vain. Youth waneth by increasing beauty, strength, youth are flowers, but fading duty, faith, love are roots, and ever green his helmet now shall make a hive for bees and lovers. Sonnets turn to holy psalms. A man at arms must now serve on his knees, and feed on prayers which our age his alms. But though from court to cottage he depart, his saint is sure of his unspotted heart and when he saddest sits in homely cell, he'll teach his swains this carol for a song. Blest be the hearts that wish my sovereign well. Cursed be the souls that think her any wrong. Goddess, allow this aged man his right to be your Bedesman. Now that was your night.