Perhaps the highest praise I have ever received. All glory goes to God, of course, more so in this case than most, for the author is unwise who praises not his Author when praised: but it is nice to find a reader for whom my humble work was fit and fated and meet.
http://www.coreymccleery.com/uncategorized/book-review-iron-chamber-of-memory-by-john-c-wright/
There was a time when I was suffering from a bout of spiritual darkness. A habitual sin, strong enough to be an addiction, had taken over my life. But, by God’s grace, I had been freed from it, though the scars and wounds it had left are still disappearing.
But one of the signs that I was healing came one night, when an urge struck me. An urge not to give in to that sin, but an urge to seek out something of beauty. An urge I had not felt in a while.
An urge to read poetry.
I found a free, online poem from master poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson that I drank in like it was fragrant wine, and it was a refreshing experience for the soul. Poetry, you see, is not like prose works in that there is an extra depth to it. One reads prose to experience a story the way one drinks water to quench thirst. But if prose is water, than poetry is wine.
Nowadays, modern poetry, which had abandoned meter, rhyme, imagery, and other such poetic devices as ‘too restrictive,’ is like soured and fouled wine, a disgusting swill that makes sure you remember the taste, and hate yourself for doing so. Modern poetry is about emotion, and nothing else; anything from agonized self-flagellation to unabashed profanity is lauded as ‘deep’ and ‘controversial,’ despite it being the opposite of the sort. Now, there is some therapeutic reason for this poetry. It is not all doggerel, but the raw emotion of it can both make it cathartic to the author, and sometimes the reader.That poetry may have some kernels of beauty in it, but that was not the thing that sated the urge to read poetry. I was not wanting to hunt for the beautiful needle in the haystack of emotional screams and profanity.
No, my friends. If you wish to drink in poetry, to indulge in true beauty, you must go to the masters of old. Tennyson, for example. Read it aloud, and savor the meter, the rhyme, the way the very language bends to create a musicality to the words, even without you adding melody to it. Savor the beauty of the words, how they make ideas and images conjure forth into your mind’s eye. It is an art that I thought lost, to create such things of beauty with words. Now, all who claim to practice this art tend to use obscure and bizarre metaphor, while pretentiously preening themselves over the quality of their prose.
And then there’s John C. Wright.
