Revivals

Restoring the soul of the West through its literature, art, and ideas

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/rZA2rx9Zoy

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

New essay on The Seafarer, one of the oldest and strangest poems in English: a man alone on a winter sea, searching for an unseen harbour fearing some darker fate may be driving him towards the rocks.

A thousand years later, it feels unnervingly modern.

Link in comments.

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/UXicN889Rr

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

The only portrait of Fyodor Dostoevsky painted in his lifetime was made by a social realist. So why does it look like a religious icon?

My new essay on Vasily Perov’s strange, magnetic portrait and whether it records a man or a myth we've all believed in since.

Link in comments

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/Vq1D8V1NYr

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

New essay on King Alfred of Wessex, the only English king called ‘the Great.’ His true war wasn’t against the Vikings. It was against forgetting.

Link in comments

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/CAuRkA2RxL

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

In 1815, 18-year-old Mary Shelley lost her first baby at 12 days old

Days later she dreamed: “my little baby came to life again…we rubbed it before the fire and it lived.”

The next summer she began Frankenstein.

New essay on grief, recognition, and violence. Link in comments.

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/ZVbtgNe4me

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

In this essay, I explore Percy Shelley through Ode to the West Wind.

Matthew Arnold called him a “beautiful but ineffectual angel, beating in the void his luminous wings in vain.”

On the contrary, Shelley was flawed, tragic man and a visionary poet.

Link in the comments.

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

A Poet’s Answer to Living without a Monument https://t.co/yUX0bFD9qh

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

A new essay on Thomas Gray, progenitor of British Romanticism, and his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.

A beautiful, radical poem that recasts the poor as equal to the rich, still remembered though no sepulchre is raised in their name.

Link in the comments

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/AXHWX7eYZf

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

There's a secret in the top corner of Edvard Munch's Scream painting. The words: "Could only have been painted by a madman."
It was written by Munch himself.
And the strange figure isn't screaming. The world is screaming. He's listening.
New essay, link in the comments👇

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/Xly9x0aQRy

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

New essay on the Anglo Saxon poem The Wanderer, an Old English elegy to grief, loss and the end of civilisation.

England’s fallen many times, it shall rise again.

Link in comments ⬇️

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

Mary among the Prisoners of Camp 60: https://t.co/iFFo9FNRrv

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

Visited the Italian Chapel on Lamb Holm years ago, one of the most moving places I’ve been. Built by POWs from almost nothing, it’s a testament to patience, endurance and faith. A monument to peace shaped from the wreckage of war. 🕊️

Article link in comments.

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

https://t.co/PrlFTOYuRJ

[Revivals @KevinRedmayne]

Before Homer. Before the Psalms. 4,000 years ago, a king lost his best friend and went on a quest to escape death. He instead found life.

New article on the Epic of Gilgamesh, see the link in the reply 👇