She tried – without success – to rally church organisations here, in direct contravention of provisions of the Vienna Convention. She is fixedly here, brewing mischief bad enough to irritate her hosts. Their lady Ambassador here has not been idle or distracted by the bloodletting back home either. But one feature gave me joy: the list of aspirants to British premiership gave pre-eminence to men and women of colour. Much more, that clearly shows how they correctly appreciate fatal weaknesses in their project here, making it vitally important to keep it under intense watch. That partly shows how deeply invested the British are in our politics. One must give it to the British establishment that even in the throes of some leadership crisis, it still remained mindful of the electoral calendar here. To that end, it despatched Professor Stephen Chan to our Zimbabwe so he could still dip his political stick into our politics as these hurtle towards elective finale. His office is to portray, not to dissect.”Įven during its hour of dystopia, the United Kingdom still finds time and urgency in minding its overseas interests and mission. They therefore make better theories and worse poems… Analysis is not the business of the poet. In proportion as men know more and think more, they look less at individuals and more at classes. Argues Macaulay: “ Generalisation is necessary to the advancement of knowledge but particularity is indispensable to the creations of imagination. Poetry thus represents and expresses human intellect in its infancy, which is why early man expressed himself through poetic incantations, and never through broad philosophical precepts. Macaulay’s basic thesis, which is quite controversial and contestable, is that poetry belongs to undeveloped man whose fascination is with the particular, with intense detail, at the expense of generalisations upon which broad knowledge is built. In typical Macaulay fashion and style, the piece on Milton wanders tangentially off its subject matter, to make broad points about human evolution and the growth of knowledge. ![]() How does one portray God as a character in a fictive narrative without taking away from His Divinity, indeed without reducing him to a mere human being? In the end, Milton thus became of the Devil’s part without intending to do so! This is what makes Milton such a riveting read.īut that’s not my interest in the afore-quoted book, and on Macaulay’s piece in it. The reason for that impious outcome is not hard to fathom: whereas Milton could freely create Satan as a character in that fictive narrative, it was a lot harder, in fact well-nigh impossible to do the same with his God.
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