August 11, 2014by Sean Dempsey When I was a childThere stood a house by a lakeIn a bed of woods it did lay.We would yearly devote–To find hearth reached by boat–On a trip that took nearly a day. When I was a child,My two brothers and I,And little sister, merely three years,We would play high […]
There perhaps is no more apt analogy for our current financial crisis than the USS Titanic. Mr Ismay with his fateful line “when can we get underway, dammit!” embodies current American sentiments like “we can’t let this crisis slow us down,” “how can we fix this?” and “the USA’s banking system is just too robust […]
T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men and Sean Dempsey’s America, 2023 both confront the spiritual and moral decay of civilization, but they do so from opposite emotional poles. Eliot’s poem is elegiac: a whispered lament for a world hollowed out by inertia and disillusionment. His “stuffed men” drift without agency, trapped in the shadow between […]
