Robert DiNapoli is a poet, translator, essayist and erstwhile lecturer on English language and literature. His books include A Far Light: A Reading of Beowulf (2016), Engelboc (2019) and Reading Old English Wisdom: The Fetters in the Frost (2021).
The longest and most accomplished poem to have come down to us from Anglo-Saxon England, Beowulf sits oddly in its ninth- or tenth-century moment. Its anonymous author appears to have been a literate monastic, immersed in the culture of text and textual authority established among the pre-literate Anglo-Saxons by missionaries dispatched by Pope Gregory the Great in 597. The Anglo-Saxons descended from Germanic pagans who'd arrived on the shores of the former Roman province of…
The neoliberals' Jane Austen. In the United States, where she made her home and found her primary audience, Ayn Rand's books inspired the first wave of neoliberal economists and neoconservative activists, whose interventions so changed the American social and political landscapes of the late 20th century. Alan Greenspan, one of her more prominent disciples, attended many a philosophical soirée at her Manhattan apartment. Rand's 'philosophy' underpins most of the unpicking of Roosevelt's New Deal policies…
EndNote and End Times: the death-cult of modern management. All right, my title combines a tag-line from Tolkien's Treebeard the Ent with a poor eschatological pun, but then we all have those days when we find ourselves muttering 'I have lived too long' or 'It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here'. Treebeard gives voice to Tolkien's misgivings about the haste and impatience that he saw driving modern industrial…
When humility has departed the culture and its sources recede. As a virtue, humility is widely and deeply underestimated. Few understand it, and still fewer practise the genuine article. I hasten-humbly, of course-to add that I count myself no exemplar on either score. But like Chaucer's Pardoner, who can preach a thumping sermon against avarice while indulging in that very vice with practised aplomb, I have contemplated embodiments of humility in many settings, both in…
