Texan and Atheist

[thesummerqueen]

Thanks! Yeah I discovered Eliot's poetry in my first or two year of college. Eliot the man seems to have had some hang-ups, but I never tired of reading "Prufrock" and others. I think I would list John Milton as my favorite poet. It's kind of like Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel ... even though some works deal mightily with religious content, that to me doesn't take away from the greatness of the works themselves.

We had an advanced English course in high school and senior year was partially devoted to existentialism. We started with Prufrock, and I fell madly in love. To this day, I can pick up a book of his poems and they give me chills. It would be a hard race between him, Keats, and Whitman. A friend lent me Borges though, and that's been fun to dip into - a good study of Blake is next.

Biblical allusions, or any sort from any mythos, have their place in art and literature. Otherwise we'd have never had Jeff Buckley's rendition of Cohen's "Hallelujah", or Bougereau's sumptuous "Birth of Venus". I recognize the role of religion in the past, I just don't think it has any place in the here and now... except in art and literature.