Gray Area

by John J. Miller on May 21, 2013 · 0 comments

in Blog Posts

Readers who want to learn more about Thomas Gray–the guy who wrote the poem that is the subject of my recent WSJ column–should check out this site, the Thomas Gray Archive.

thomas-gray-5-sized

Elegiac

by John J. Miller on May 18, 2013 · 0 comments

in Blog Posts

This weekend’s WSJ carries my article on what was once arguably the most famous poem in the world: “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard,” by Thomas Gray:

“Gray’s Elegy,” wrote Leslie Stephen (the father of Virginia Woolf), “includes more familiar phrases than any poem of equal length in the language.” Its 32 stanzas burst with celebrated passages: “The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day”; “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen”; “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife”; and so on. Robert L. Mack, Gray’s definitive biographer, has observed that a recent edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations draws from 15 stanzas and reproduces 13 of them whole.

For the full text of the poem, go here.

Gray's Elegy

Back to Brownback

May 8, 2013

NPR recently covered the Kansas governorship of Sam Brownback. It compelled me to look up my profile of Brownback in 2006, when he was a senator and thinking about running for president. Today, Brownback is all about the love — not just for the Clintons, but for everyone. As he mulls a long-shot bid for [...]

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Sanford’s Return

May 8, 2013

So Mark Sanford — he of the Argentinean mistress — will be a congressman again. Really, South Carolina? He was the best guy for the job? Family values matter to conservatives. Except when they don’t. I used to be an admirer of Sanford, and wrote a favorable profile of him in 2005. Our first sit-down [...]

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Reagan Revolution

May 2, 2013

My final Q&A session from Hillsdale College’s American history online course is now posted. It’s a conversation about Ronald Reagan with history prof Terrence Moore. At Hillsdale, we kinda like Reagan — so much that we have a statue of him on campus.

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Bushed

April 25, 2013

NRO asked writers to name the best and worst of George W. Bush’s presidency. Here’s what I wrote for the symposium: The best thing about George W. Bush was that he won elections, which is a quality that GOP presidential candidates and their supporters simply can’t take for granted — not at a time when [...]

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