{"id":3439,"date":"2006-09-19T00:01:32","date_gmt":"2006-09-19T04:01:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=3439"},"modified":"2006-09-18T23:33:19","modified_gmt":"2006-09-19T03:33:19","slug":"keats-on-the-promise-of-parochialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2006\/09\/keats-on-the-promise-of-parochialism\/","title":{"rendered":"Keats on the Promise of Parochialism"},"content":{"rendered":"

Golden Ages tend to be rather parochial. For example, Hawthorne\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Boston was presided over by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. who confidently proclaimed that the Massachusetts State House was the hub of the solar system. (Or maybe it was Beacon Hill. I forget.) John Keats wonderfully captured this sort of backward self-confidence in a few lines of his Fragment of an Ode to Maia<\/i>, where he asks:<\/p>\n

Mother of Hermes! And still youthful Maia!
\nMay I sing to thee
\nAs thou wast hymn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122d on the shores of Baieae?
\nOr may I woo thee
\nIn Earlier Sicilian? Or thy smiles
\nSeek as they once were sought, in Grecian isles,
\nBy bards who died content on pleasant sward,
\nLeaving great verse unto a little clan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I think that parochialism is a depressingly common subtext in Mormon intellectual life. Briefly stated, there are a lot of smart kids from places like Salt Lake City, southeastern Idaho, or suburban wards outside of LA or DC. They live within the bosom of Mormonism, and one day encounter the big, wide, non-Mormon intellectual world. It is a great and exciting place. But it also leaves them feeling slightly embarrassed of their past. After reading through this or that great thinker or studying in the ivy-covered buildings in Cambridge, Princeton, Chicago, Berkley, or some other academic Mecca, the local meeting house seems somewhat crass, and the untutored mass of Mormon teachings somewhat retrograde and embarrassing. Mormonism makes them feel parochial.<\/p>\n

Of course, anxiety and embarrassment, the horror of parochialism, probably strikes every non-WASP group in America from time to time, and perhaps especially when those groups stray into the Universities. Indeed, with the rise of multi-culturalism, even the WASPs are entitled to their moments of alienation if they are so inclined. Mormons, once they find \u00e2\u20ac\u201c as Damon Linker put it so simply on this blog \u00e2\u20ac\u201c \u00e2\u20ac\u0153how profoundly ridiculous most non-Mormons consider [them] to be\u00e2\u20ac? frequently embark on the all-American tradition of ethnic self-loathing in an effort to, well, avoid the \u00e2\u20ac\u0153profoundly ridiculous\u00e2\u20ac? aura of Orem or Idaho. In doing this, they trod a well-worn path taken by Irish, Poles, Jews, and other ethnic minorities before them.<\/p>\n

Keats, however, provides a wonderful alternative view of parochialism. A view of <\/p>\n

\u00e2\u20ac\u00a6bards who died content on pleasant sward,
\nLeaving great verse unto a little clan<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Keats, weighed down by all of the tradition that rendered him supremely unparochial, envied those who stood at the beginning and created the verse to which even the carefully studied spontaneity of his Romanticism must allude.<\/p>\n

O give me their old vigour!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

he pleads. Keats might envy our plight. Mormon intellectuals, far from redeeming themselves from the embarrassment of Happy Valley or some other unfortunate relation, instead have an opprotunity to leave great verse unto a little clan. The difficulty lies not in the littleness of the clan but in the composition of the verse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Golden Ages tend to be rather parochial.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}