I’d love to know why you consider this your favorite poem, Josh. I wasn’t familiar with it, and I find it intriguing but need to read it again a few times to really take it in.
This was written by George Eliot in the 1870s, and only discovered in her notebook in 1959. The metaphysical issues with which she is grappling concern limits to the scientific world-view, the materialist world-view. Today, it is ensconced in science -- wrongly, I think, -- that space and the matter that fills space are all that exists; there is nothing else. But in Eliot's day, Darwin was new. Organic chemistry was a gleam in Friedrich Wöhler's eye.
Eliot was in the highest intellectual circles of her era, and she participated in these debates as science was devastating religion, spreading its tentacles over philosophy, threatening to take over as the one and only reasonable world-view. She resisted this, not by arguing against it, but by offering multiple alternative and complementary world-views.
The poem "A College Breakfast Party" is a philosophical discussion among students, faculty, and a Christian cleric, all treated even-handedly by Eliot. The present poem "I grant you ample leave" is hypothesized to be an "out-take" that didn't make it into that longer poem, and remained 85 years in her notebook before publication.
I’d love to know why you consider this your favorite poem, Josh. I wasn’t familiar with it, and I find it intriguing but need to read it again a few times to really take it in.
This was written by George Eliot in the 1870s, and only discovered in her notebook in 1959. The metaphysical issues with which she is grappling concern limits to the scientific world-view, the materialist world-view. Today, it is ensconced in science -- wrongly, I think, -- that space and the matter that fills space are all that exists; there is nothing else. But in Eliot's day, Darwin was new. Organic chemistry was a gleam in Friedrich Wöhler's eye.
Eliot was in the highest intellectual circles of her era, and she participated in these debates as science was devastating religion, spreading its tentacles over philosophy, threatening to take over as the one and only reasonable world-view. She resisted this, not by arguing against it, but by offering multiple alternative and complementary world-views.
The poem "A College Breakfast Party" is a philosophical discussion among students, faculty, and a Christian cleric, all treated even-handedly by Eliot. The present poem "I grant you ample leave" is hypothesized to be an "out-take" that didn't make it into that longer poem, and remained 85 years in her notebook before publication.
https://www.poetrynook.com/poem/college-breakfast-party
https://www.archive.org/download/spc166_1704_librivox/spc166_collegebreakfastparty_jjm_128kb.mp3