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The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus
Follow Andrew Klavan to a deeper, richer understanding of the words of Jesus. Andrew Klavan believed what he read in the Gospels, but he often struggled to understand what Jesus really meant. So he began a journey of wrestling with the beautiful and often strange words of Jesus. He learned Greek in order to read the Gospels in their original languages, and he vowed to set aside any preconceptions about what the Scriptures say. But it wasn't until he began exploring how some of history's greatest writers wrestled with the same issues we confront today--political upheaval, rejection of social norms, growing disbelief in God--that he found a new way of understanding what Jesus meant. In The Truth and Beauty , Klavan combines a decades-long writing career with a lifetime of reading to discover a fresh understanding of the Gospels. By reading the words of Jesus through the life and work of writers such as William Wordsworth and John Keats, Mary Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge--the English romantics--Klavan discovered a way to encounter Jesus in a deeper and more profound way than ever before. For readers seeking to find renewed meaning in the words of Jesus--and for those who are striving for belief in a materialistic world-- The Truth and Beauty offers an intimate account of one man's struggle to understand the Gospels in all their strangeness, and so find his way to a life that is, as he says, "the most creative, the most joyful, and surely the most true."
272 pages, Hardcover
Published April 5, 2022
About the author
Andrew Klavan
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 296 reviews
February 21, 2023
Not being a fan of politics anymore, I was not exactly excited about this book which was sent to me by a friend. Maybe that is why I was pleasantly delighted by this book.
My first worry was that it would be one of the increasingly popular evangelical virtue mongering books that seem completely ignorant of the dismal history of virtue. Not so here. Klavan understands that there is mystery here and not 12 steps.
Chapter three was my favorite with the simply profound idea that Frankenstein’s monster was a motherless being.
My first worry was that it would be one of the increasingly popular evangelical virtue mongering books that seem completely ignorant of the dismal history of virtue. Not so here. Klavan understands that there is mystery here and not 12 steps.
Chapter three was my favorite with the simply profound idea that Frankenstein’s monster was a motherless being.
May 11, 2026
As someone who was born in the catholic faith (in Italy), then lost it with disastrous consequences and then, by the grace of God, went back to it, I found this book fascinating and stimulating. It resonated deeply with me (thank you, Barry, for the recommendation!).
Klavan reflects on his catholic faith in a personal way and, like any catholic author writing in our day and age, he wants to make a strong case for what is good, true and beautiful, against the ugliness and wrongness of materialism, nihilism and relativism — all of them currently dominating our secular western world.
I’m with him 200% on this.
I loved this sentence: “We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means” — which hits the nail on the head, when it comes to the huge limitations of psychotherapy.
Another passage that stayed with me is this: “Jesus does not need to rewrite the law of Moses. He infuses the law with the love in which the law was given. And by some wonder beyond the power of mere justice, the law erases itself with its own hand”.
And this one: “In the end, life becomes literature, and literature has meaning because life has meaning”. (Made me think of those sad readers for whom the words on the page, the writing style itself, are more important than the meaning of a story).
I also loved Klavan’s curious and critical approach to the gospel — I personally despise the attitude of christians who prefer to hide behind “it’s written there!” rather than making the effort (and having the honesty) to express concerns about gospel passages and then working on finding the solutions to those concerns.
There are many examples of this in the book — it’s this great “not being satisfied with simple answers” personality trait which the author and I (and probably most of his readers) seem to share. One example is the question of why Jesus had to weep when he got to Lazarus’ tomb, if he knew he would have resurrected him.
Or the central example made by the author, which has to do with the beatitudes: he wonders, what is the point of this philosophy? And only thanks to his son’s suggestion, he understands that he shouldn’t be looking for a philosophy in the beatitudes, but for a person: Jesus Christ.
And to be honest: I love almost every book that comes out fighting fairly and intelligently for christian faith.
——
For what concerns Klavan’s thesis that the great English Romantic poets, by contrasting the rationalism of the Enlightenment, saved the core of christianity and pushed it forward — this is, at a very respectful best, a huge exaggeration, if not a flat-out incorrect statement.
His claim that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge “reconstructed the moral imagination of the West” had me flabbergasted. Perhaps it captures one specific aspect of a general view of English Romanticism, but … no, overall that’s not a correct statement under any perspective.
….Modernity empties the world of meaning, English Romantic poetry restores depth, and this restored depth points back to Christianity… ??
The problem is not that this story is entirely false, but that it’s very partial and almost entirely false.
A more rigorous account — still sticking to the divulgative, popular category to which this book belongs — would have framed “English Romanticism” as a limited slice of the much broader movement of “Western Romanticism”.
Yes, the poets in their circle influenced C.S. Lewis, but:
1.first, their relationship to christianity was complicated at best. And some of them were atheist or agnostic.
2.more importantly: what happened to the rest of Romanticism? The great thinkers and influencers who lived in Germany, France, Spain, Italy?
In Klavan’s perspective, they don’t exist. He never mentions these non-English historic realities.
In Italy, Catholicism never fully broke with culture in the same way of christianity in England. It remained embedded in art, architecture, and daily life. It didn’t need a “Romantic rediscovery” to feel alive.
But even if we were to ignore the cultural differences among various countries and romantic authors, in general we could say that rather than a “reconstruction,” Europe saw a shift from a world in which belief in God was almost unavoidable to a modern condition in which belief became one option among many.
Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, scientific development, changes in social organization …. that’s a massively complex chunk of history that has LITTLE to do with a small group of English poets, as famous and influential as they might have been.
Also, the Romantic poets did not restore a shared moral framework. Rather, they tried to recover a sense of depth, interiority, and meaning through nature, imagination, and subjective experience.
Their work can be seen as a form of “re-enchantment,” preserving the intuition that reality is not exhausted by material explanation. In this sense, MAYBE we could say that Romanticism helped sustain a cultural space in which religious belief remained psychologically and imaginatively viable.
But do you see how this is only about 2% of “these two English poets rebuilt the moral imagination of the West and saved the spirit of christianity”?
The central connection of the book between Christianity’s core truth and a portion of English Romanticism as a historical nexus, as a filter through which we should look at Western christian history, doesn’t hold true and doesn’t have a lot of respect for the big picture.
All this comes from a European reader who is no theologian, but who’s read a good amount of great theology, especially that of Joseph Ratzinger.
In fact, Ratzinger sharpens this particular critique even further: while he agrees that beauty and aesthetic experience can open the human person to transcendence, he insists that beauty cannot function as an independent source of truth.
Detached from truth and goodness, beauty becomes ambiguous and potentially misleading, easily collapsing into subjectivism or aestheticism.
Where Romanticism often elevates inner experience as a guide to reality, Ratzinger maintains that truth must be received rather than generated from within. Beauty may awaken longing, but it cannot by itself determine what that longing corresponds to.
Seen in this light, the weakness in Klavan’s formulation is that it relies on a Romantic move (treating the experience of depth or beauty as if it carried inherent epistemic authority) and then extends that move into sweeping historical claims.
A more defensible position would be that Romanticism preserved certain intuitions about meaning, transcendence, and the significance of beauty, that resist reductive materialism and can prepare the ground for religious belief.
In a couple of places in the book, just like the Romantic poets, Klavan inches very close to the risk of pantheism (God is nature), although his catholic faith is clear, resounding and inspirational.
Also, Klavan spends too much time on biographical and historical details that don’t add anything to his argument and that, in a more serious work, should have been made implicit.
Read “The desecration of man” for a more precise take on the role of enchantment in the modern world.
——
Finally — I will add here a thought that was prompted by reading this book. There is a widespread stereotype today that believers lack the “courage” to face reality as it truly is (stripped of stories, fables, and myths) … because we are nothing more than a jumble of atoms and molecules, and only the truly brave atheists can accept that. Nietzsche was convinced of that.
But it’s not true that believers lack courage. It takes courage to believe as well, and to entrust oneself to God.
The truth of christian faith has not much to do with great courage or lack thereof.
The point is, rather, that a materialist and nihilist view of life is an inhuman one.
As such, it can never truly work, because a human being cannot exist without meaning.
It is precisely this inhumanity of materialism that causes a human soul to fold upon itself — very often, not even in a conscious way — and it leads to spiritual death.
The resurrected Christ is pure and glorious life.
Happy Easter 2026, everyone.
Klavan reflects on his catholic faith in a personal way and, like any catholic author writing in our day and age, he wants to make a strong case for what is good, true and beautiful, against the ugliness and wrongness of materialism, nihilism and relativism — all of them currently dominating our secular western world.
I’m with him 200% on this.
I loved this sentence: “We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means” — which hits the nail on the head, when it comes to the huge limitations of psychotherapy.
Another passage that stayed with me is this: “Jesus does not need to rewrite the law of Moses. He infuses the law with the love in which the law was given. And by some wonder beyond the power of mere justice, the law erases itself with its own hand”.
And this one: “In the end, life becomes literature, and literature has meaning because life has meaning”. (Made me think of those sad readers for whom the words on the page, the writing style itself, are more important than the meaning of a story).
I also loved Klavan’s curious and critical approach to the gospel — I personally despise the attitude of christians who prefer to hide behind “it’s written there!” rather than making the effort (and having the honesty) to express concerns about gospel passages and then working on finding the solutions to those concerns.
There are many examples of this in the book — it’s this great “not being satisfied with simple answers” personality trait which the author and I (and probably most of his readers) seem to share. One example is the question of why Jesus had to weep when he got to Lazarus’ tomb, if he knew he would have resurrected him.
Or the central example made by the author, which has to do with the beatitudes: he wonders, what is the point of this philosophy? And only thanks to his son’s suggestion, he understands that he shouldn’t be looking for a philosophy in the beatitudes, but for a person: Jesus Christ.
And to be honest: I love almost every book that comes out fighting fairly and intelligently for christian faith.
——
For what concerns Klavan’s thesis that the great English Romantic poets, by contrasting the rationalism of the Enlightenment, saved the core of christianity and pushed it forward — this is, at a very respectful best, a huge exaggeration, if not a flat-out incorrect statement.
His claim that William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge “reconstructed the moral imagination of the West” had me flabbergasted. Perhaps it captures one specific aspect of a general view of English Romanticism, but … no, overall that’s not a correct statement under any perspective.
….Modernity empties the world of meaning, English Romantic poetry restores depth, and this restored depth points back to Christianity… ??
The problem is not that this story is entirely false, but that it’s very partial and almost entirely false.
A more rigorous account — still sticking to the divulgative, popular category to which this book belongs — would have framed “English Romanticism” as a limited slice of the much broader movement of “Western Romanticism”.
Yes, the poets in their circle influenced C.S. Lewis, but:
1.first, their relationship to christianity was complicated at best. And some of them were atheist or agnostic.
2.more importantly: what happened to the rest of Romanticism? The great thinkers and influencers who lived in Germany, France, Spain, Italy?
In Klavan’s perspective, they don’t exist. He never mentions these non-English historic realities.
In Italy, Catholicism never fully broke with culture in the same way of christianity in England. It remained embedded in art, architecture, and daily life. It didn’t need a “Romantic rediscovery” to feel alive.
But even if we were to ignore the cultural differences among various countries and romantic authors, in general we could say that rather than a “reconstruction,” Europe saw a shift from a world in which belief in God was almost unavoidable to a modern condition in which belief became one option among many.
Protestant Reformation, Enlightenment, scientific development, changes in social organization …. that’s a massively complex chunk of history that has LITTLE to do with a small group of English poets, as famous and influential as they might have been.
Also, the Romantic poets did not restore a shared moral framework. Rather, they tried to recover a sense of depth, interiority, and meaning through nature, imagination, and subjective experience.
Their work can be seen as a form of “re-enchantment,” preserving the intuition that reality is not exhausted by material explanation. In this sense, MAYBE we could say that Romanticism helped sustain a cultural space in which religious belief remained psychologically and imaginatively viable.
But do you see how this is only about 2% of “these two English poets rebuilt the moral imagination of the West and saved the spirit of christianity”?
The central connection of the book between Christianity’s core truth and a portion of English Romanticism as a historical nexus, as a filter through which we should look at Western christian history, doesn’t hold true and doesn’t have a lot of respect for the big picture.
All this comes from a European reader who is no theologian, but who’s read a good amount of great theology, especially that of Joseph Ratzinger.
In fact, Ratzinger sharpens this particular critique even further: while he agrees that beauty and aesthetic experience can open the human person to transcendence, he insists that beauty cannot function as an independent source of truth.
Detached from truth and goodness, beauty becomes ambiguous and potentially misleading, easily collapsing into subjectivism or aestheticism.
Where Romanticism often elevates inner experience as a guide to reality, Ratzinger maintains that truth must be received rather than generated from within. Beauty may awaken longing, but it cannot by itself determine what that longing corresponds to.
Seen in this light, the weakness in Klavan’s formulation is that it relies on a Romantic move (treating the experience of depth or beauty as if it carried inherent epistemic authority) and then extends that move into sweeping historical claims.
A more defensible position would be that Romanticism preserved certain intuitions about meaning, transcendence, and the significance of beauty, that resist reductive materialism and can prepare the ground for religious belief.
In a couple of places in the book, just like the Romantic poets, Klavan inches very close to the risk of pantheism (God is nature), although his catholic faith is clear, resounding and inspirational.
Also, Klavan spends too much time on biographical and historical details that don’t add anything to his argument and that, in a more serious work, should have been made implicit.
Read “The desecration of man” for a more precise take on the role of enchantment in the modern world.
——
Finally — I will add here a thought that was prompted by reading this book. There is a widespread stereotype today that believers lack the “courage” to face reality as it truly is (stripped of stories, fables, and myths) … because we are nothing more than a jumble of atoms and molecules, and only the truly brave atheists can accept that. Nietzsche was convinced of that.
But it’s not true that believers lack courage. It takes courage to believe as well, and to entrust oneself to God.
The truth of christian faith has not much to do with great courage or lack thereof.
The point is, rather, that a materialist and nihilist view of life is an inhuman one.
As such, it can never truly work, because a human being cannot exist without meaning.
It is precisely this inhumanity of materialism that causes a human soul to fold upon itself — very often, not even in a conscious way — and it leads to spiritual death.
The resurrected Christ is pure and glorious life.
Happy Easter 2026, everyone.
May 17, 2022
I don’t know that I’ve ever read a book that misrepresented itself so badly through the title and back cover synopsis. Given the lengthy and specific title, The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus, Andrew Klavan’s central thesis seems fairly clear: By understanding the English romantics, we can come to a better understanding of Jesus. Why, then, does Klavan continually litter condescending and irrelevant culture war drivel? Some examples:
“A police officer shoots a violent black criminal—or is the cop the criminal and the black man a victim of a system that privileges whiteness so that his criminality is really a kind of justice?” (p. 65)
“Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for pleasure without consequence or attachment.” (p. 88)
“Viewers who did not go into ecstasies over a wooden piece of second-rate silliness like Black Panther were suspected of being racist because the hero was black.” (p. 92)
“Perhaps so-called sex change operations will no longer be a cosmetic illusion reinforced by this misuse of him and her pronouns, but a genuine fact of technological life. Perhaps then the humanizing tasks of femininity—creating life out of matter, homes out of houses, minds out of brains, and souls out of bodies—will fall equally on the genders…” (p. 94)
“The marketplace does not want to lose its women workers to the nursery. The state does not want to cede its power to the fathers of families. In material terms, it’s unfair; it’s oppressive. So the world is sure to turn to its science and technology and social systems to ‘solving the problem’ of gender, which is really just the problem of femininity and its core in spiritual action. The world will learn to grow babies in machines, to nurture them in institutions, to free women for the market, to strip men of their authority, to make us the same.” (p. 183)
From beginning to end, The Truth and Beauty reads more like the mental breakdown of a man scared that women not being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen will be society’s doom. (You can imagine, then what he thinks of the lives of the English romantics—proto-feminist Mary Shelley, in particular.) In this book, there is little truth, scant beauty, and barely anything of Jesus.
Indeed, the words of Jesus are barely discussed at all, relegated to the book’s final section. Klavan is not a biblical scholar or theologian, nor is he a pastor or in any way trained in reading or exegeting Scripture. That amateurism shows. For literary effect, he reworks the chronology of Jesus to place the wedding at Cana near the end of Jesus’s ministry—because it better fits the narrative he wants to establish about Mary. He elevates Milton’s creation hierarchy to the level of inspired Word, writing that man was made for God and woman was made for the God in man. He fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s grave, positing that Jesus is crying over mankind’s blindness and sin. He offers a flawed and banal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. And all of these comes in an unfocused meandering ramble that I suppose Klavan felt sounded mystical.
The Truth and the Beauty is a poor front for Klavan to spout racist and sexist ideologies under the guise of teaching readers about the English romantics and Jesus. He accomplishes neither. There is little to redeem this book, save for some artful phrases about the nature of story. Zondervan should be ashamed that they’ve published this.
“A police officer shoots a violent black criminal—or is the cop the criminal and the black man a victim of a system that privileges whiteness so that his criminality is really a kind of justice?” (p. 65)
“Through the miracle of science, a woman can now medicate her body so that men may use it for pleasure without consequence or attachment.” (p. 88)
“Viewers who did not go into ecstasies over a wooden piece of second-rate silliness like Black Panther were suspected of being racist because the hero was black.” (p. 92)
“Perhaps so-called sex change operations will no longer be a cosmetic illusion reinforced by this misuse of him and her pronouns, but a genuine fact of technological life. Perhaps then the humanizing tasks of femininity—creating life out of matter, homes out of houses, minds out of brains, and souls out of bodies—will fall equally on the genders…” (p. 94)
“The marketplace does not want to lose its women workers to the nursery. The state does not want to cede its power to the fathers of families. In material terms, it’s unfair; it’s oppressive. So the world is sure to turn to its science and technology and social systems to ‘solving the problem’ of gender, which is really just the problem of femininity and its core in spiritual action. The world will learn to grow babies in machines, to nurture them in institutions, to free women for the market, to strip men of their authority, to make us the same.” (p. 183)
From beginning to end, The Truth and Beauty reads more like the mental breakdown of a man scared that women not being barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen will be society’s doom. (You can imagine, then what he thinks of the lives of the English romantics—proto-feminist Mary Shelley, in particular.) In this book, there is little truth, scant beauty, and barely anything of Jesus.
Indeed, the words of Jesus are barely discussed at all, relegated to the book’s final section. Klavan is not a biblical scholar or theologian, nor is he a pastor or in any way trained in reading or exegeting Scripture. That amateurism shows. For literary effect, he reworks the chronology of Jesus to place the wedding at Cana near the end of Jesus’s ministry—because it better fits the narrative he wants to establish about Mary. He elevates Milton’s creation hierarchy to the level of inspired Word, writing that man was made for God and woman was made for the God in man. He fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of Jesus weeping at Lazarus’s grave, positing that Jesus is crying over mankind’s blindness and sin. He offers a flawed and banal interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount. And all of these comes in an unfocused meandering ramble that I suppose Klavan felt sounded mystical.
The Truth and the Beauty is a poor front for Klavan to spout racist and sexist ideologies under the guise of teaching readers about the English romantics and Jesus. He accomplishes neither. There is little to redeem this book, save for some artful phrases about the nature of story. Zondervan should be ashamed that they’ve published this.
July 22, 2022
"I want to know how to become the man God made me to be, how to do the works he created me to do. I trust Him with the big questions of eternity. I trust Him with the end of days...I want to know what it looks like to live … to the fullest."
- Andrew Klavan
This was a slow burner but became something of an inferno by the end. I was in and out with him until the latter portion of the book. Some parts were a bit dubious exegetically, I think, and I would juxtapose his readings of key Gospel stories with others.
However, I loved the parts of the book critiquing transhumanism and its anti-woman biases, the section on the Trinity and fractals, parts about the metaphorical nature of all language, portions about the grammar of the body, & bits and pieces about the poets turbulent spiritual lives. So, I'm going to rate it highly because they really clicked in my mind and spoke to the heart.
Andrew is a skilful writer, whose slower and clearer thinking far transcends his political persona. I wish more people would read him as a serious thinker, because he has much to say that is worthwhile. That became evident in the latter stages of this book, as it has done to me in reading his articles. Such as the one for City Journal: 'Can We Believe?' and his engrossing biography.
He is well-respected as a writer of fiction, across political lines, and rightfully so. But don't sleep on his non-fiction.
- Andrew Klavan
This was a slow burner but became something of an inferno by the end. I was in and out with him until the latter portion of the book. Some parts were a bit dubious exegetically, I think, and I would juxtapose his readings of key Gospel stories with others.
However, I loved the parts of the book critiquing transhumanism and its anti-woman biases, the section on the Trinity and fractals, parts about the metaphorical nature of all language, portions about the grammar of the body, & bits and pieces about the poets turbulent spiritual lives. So, I'm going to rate it highly because they really clicked in my mind and spoke to the heart.
Andrew is a skilful writer, whose slower and clearer thinking far transcends his political persona. I wish more people would read him as a serious thinker, because he has much to say that is worthwhile. That became evident in the latter stages of this book, as it has done to me in reading his articles. Such as the one for City Journal: 'Can We Believe?' and his engrossing biography.
He is well-respected as a writer of fiction, across political lines, and rightfully so. But don't sleep on his non-fiction.
April 11, 2022
The New Romantics
Author Andrew Klavan was bummed by the Beatitudes. They read to him like: "Blessed are you when your life is awful, because in heaven, trust me, it's gonna be great." (page 6.) When he realized his problem was trying to understand a philosophy instead of getting to know a person, he determined to read the Gospels with a pure, blank-slate mind: "I ignored every doctrine of theology, including those of the apostle Paul; I wanted Jesus direct, unfiltered by tradition." (p. 5.) That didn't help: "It wasn't just the Sermon on the Mount that I found odd and blurry. It was almost all blurry and all odd." (p. 10.) So he turned back to philosophy - way back - to the Romanticism of the early 1800s, and began "reconstructing Jesus" accordingly. (pp. 167-228.)
Romanticism has become something of a fad for Christians in search of meaning in our post-Christian, post-Modern times. See, e.g., Romantic Religion by R. J. Reilly; Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination by Malcom Guite; Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God by Rankin Wilbourne; The Imagination of God: Art, Creativity and Truth in the Bible by Brian Godawa; Apologetics and the Christian Imagination by Holly Ordway. But Romanticism was short-lived for a reason, and the new Romantics have singularly failed to warrant its revival.
After the Enlightenment reduced the universe to meaningless matter in motion, Romanticism endeavored to re-enchant the world. While its poets promised a spiritual reality beyond what the eyes can see, all they delivered were metaphors about spiritual things derived from their perceptions of the natural world. The poet might speak of beholding heaven in a dew drop but all he really saw was the dew drop; heaven was only imagined. People who wanted a real heaven eventually discovered the poets only offered an imaginary one, and so Romanticism withered away.
The author here offers nothing more than the original Romantics, namely, metaphors. Jesus is a metaphor, your life is a metaphor, metaphors are metaphors for other metaphors, and its "metaphors all the way down," says Klavan. (p. 175.) Like the old Romantics, the new ones never reach a spiritual reality. Nature is as close as we can get to a spiritual realm because, the poets tell us, Nature is a metaphor for the kingdom of heaven. And that kingdom is within us. We create it with our imaginations, or rather, the poets create it for us as they are better at imagining stuff.
One thing the original Romantics held in common with their philosophical foes, the Materialists, was the Kantian view that the perceived world was the only one accessible to human understanding, and ultimate reality - if it existed at all - was unknowable. Thus the Romantics declared that if the world was to be infused with spiritual life, the poets had to first create then put it there. Samuel Coleridge wrote, "Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth; A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud; Enveloping the Earth--." With God's reality unreachable, the poets claimed for themselves the divine right to create their own. Coleridge described his imaginative powers as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" and poet-philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, "The artist is become a creator God."
Of course, today's Christian Romantics cannot be so bold as their 19th Century predecessors. They must at least pay lip-service to the existence of a real, ultimate Triune God about whom something true can be known. Klavan tries, but he's not very convincing: "I believe with all my heart that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but if it turns out he's five guys named Moe, I'm not going to cancel my vacation." (p. 6.)
And that, my friends, is the author's deeper understanding of the Gospels gleaned from England's greatest poets.
Author Andrew Klavan was bummed by the Beatitudes. They read to him like: "Blessed are you when your life is awful, because in heaven, trust me, it's gonna be great." (page 6.) When he realized his problem was trying to understand a philosophy instead of getting to know a person, he determined to read the Gospels with a pure, blank-slate mind: "I ignored every doctrine of theology, including those of the apostle Paul; I wanted Jesus direct, unfiltered by tradition." (p. 5.) That didn't help: "It wasn't just the Sermon on the Mount that I found odd and blurry. It was almost all blurry and all odd." (p. 10.) So he turned back to philosophy - way back - to the Romanticism of the early 1800s, and began "reconstructing Jesus" accordingly. (pp. 167-228.)
Romanticism has become something of a fad for Christians in search of meaning in our post-Christian, post-Modern times. See, e.g., Romantic Religion by R. J. Reilly; Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination by Malcom Guite; Union with Christ: The Way to Know and Enjoy God by Rankin Wilbourne; The Imagination of God: Art, Creativity and Truth in the Bible by Brian Godawa; Apologetics and the Christian Imagination by Holly Ordway. But Romanticism was short-lived for a reason, and the new Romantics have singularly failed to warrant its revival.
After the Enlightenment reduced the universe to meaningless matter in motion, Romanticism endeavored to re-enchant the world. While its poets promised a spiritual reality beyond what the eyes can see, all they delivered were metaphors about spiritual things derived from their perceptions of the natural world. The poet might speak of beholding heaven in a dew drop but all he really saw was the dew drop; heaven was only imagined. People who wanted a real heaven eventually discovered the poets only offered an imaginary one, and so Romanticism withered away.
The author here offers nothing more than the original Romantics, namely, metaphors. Jesus is a metaphor, your life is a metaphor, metaphors are metaphors for other metaphors, and its "metaphors all the way down," says Klavan. (p. 175.) Like the old Romantics, the new ones never reach a spiritual reality. Nature is as close as we can get to a spiritual realm because, the poets tell us, Nature is a metaphor for the kingdom of heaven. And that kingdom is within us. We create it with our imaginations, or rather, the poets create it for us as they are better at imagining stuff.
One thing the original Romantics held in common with their philosophical foes, the Materialists, was the Kantian view that the perceived world was the only one accessible to human understanding, and ultimate reality - if it existed at all - was unknowable. Thus the Romantics declared that if the world was to be infused with spiritual life, the poets had to first create then put it there. Samuel Coleridge wrote, "Ah! From the soul itself must issue forth; A light, a glory, a fair luminous cloud; Enveloping the Earth--." With God's reality unreachable, the poets claimed for themselves the divine right to create their own. Coleridge described his imaginative powers as "a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM" and poet-philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder wrote, "The artist is become a creator God."
Of course, today's Christian Romantics cannot be so bold as their 19th Century predecessors. They must at least pay lip-service to the existence of a real, ultimate Triune God about whom something true can be known. Klavan tries, but he's not very convincing: "I believe with all my heart that God is three persons, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, but if it turns out he's five guys named Moe, I'm not going to cancel my vacation." (p. 6.)
And that, my friends, is the author's deeper understanding of the Gospels gleaned from England's greatest poets.
May 30, 2022
This book of Andrew Klavan's meditations on how important great poets and writers like William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Shakespeare, and John Keats convey goodness, beauty, and truth, and how he correlates that to Jesus of Nazareth being the source of all goodness, truth, and beauty-The Word, The Logos, and The Truth Incarnate, does make for a fascinating and moving read.
I really appreciate Klavan's emphasis on the importance of literature and art to humanity, his references to my favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, and his delving into the paradoxes found in Jesus of Nazareth's first century teachings. Whatever your worldview, I highly recommend this book.
I really appreciate Klavan's emphasis on the importance of literature and art to humanity, his references to my favorite writer, C. S. Lewis, and his delving into the paradoxes found in Jesus of Nazareth's first century teachings. Whatever your worldview, I highly recommend this book.
April 28, 2022
Utterly fascinating. This book was not what I expected (more of the words of Jesus part) but I loved it (a look at our cultural/philosophical history post-middle ages and how the poets spoke to that out of their spirituality). Klavan had so many intriguing perspectives on things I thought I’d wrapped my head around. I’ll be thinking about this one for a while and I feel like I’ll need to read it in physical copy soon to really digest some things.
June 13, 2022
The beauty of truth in an age of lawlessness
Klaven always has a way of words and making them known to his readers. A discovery of the gospel that urges for more. I want more understanding, more peeling of the walls that surround my heart. How different we are but how much we need the gospel of Christ. It is our sin that keeps us far from God and or realization of that sin draws us near.
Klaven always has a way of words and making them known to his readers. A discovery of the gospel that urges for more. I want more understanding, more peeling of the walls that surround my heart. How different we are but how much we need the gospel of Christ. It is our sin that keeps us far from God and or realization of that sin draws us near.
March 27, 2023
I saw this book online, I knew who Andrew Klaven was, I knew our world perspectives were probably not too different, but it was a NEW book, did I really trust a NEW book to teach me how to read literature? In an act of blind faith, reassured by the title which was composed of my two favorite concepts in this wonderful life (Truth and Beauty), I clicked the order button and held my breath. LOW AND BEHOLD it arrived in a brown parcel and proved to be the exact book my soul needed in the desolate and depressing months of winter. This book is good because it is old because it is based on the old, it will grow even older, it will last. This book needs to be read, it is a book that needs to be annotated and underlined and common-placed.
Andrew Klaven is a man who understands and clearly communicates why Western Civilization matters, it’s not about Geography, it’s about everything that is good and holy in this world, the tradition that is based on the Bible and what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross.
Klaven is honest and comical in a way that is relatable and disarming, the book is brilliant and deep without compromising it’s accessibility and without feeling pedantic, and he has done what few non-fiction writers have achieved: his work is a story. It takes you on the journey (the story) of thought and philosophy and the word made flesh.
My favorite chapters were Unhallowed Arts (Mary Shelley) and The Songs of Spring (Keats). Most of the points he brings to life about literature completely opened my mind and put Romanticism in a new perspective for me while still building on what I already loved about it.
Frankenstein is my favorite book (if a reader can even have just one) and I had an understanding that it was deeply rooted in Paradise Lost and the authors mothers feminist views, and that there was a definite emphasis on women. But in Unhallowed Arts he revealed so much more to me, it was like all the dots I saw on the page were finally connected more cohesively than ever before, like I was falling in love with the book all over again.
Let me also add (perhaps this is the most important part) that you do not need any previous knowledge of anything to read this book, with maybe the exception of literacy. He doesn’t bore those who already love the Romantic movement well with dumbed-down recaps but doesn’t talk so lofty that those who have the brains of a baby Idaho potato couldn’t fully understand and love it too. Edit: I take it back, an Idaho potato could not understand this book, I read some of the negative reviews and there are clearly some Idaho Potatoes in this world.
One last point: how would one put this book in any one genre? It does not rabbit trail yet seems about everything all at once. I think that speaks volumes to this: Truth and Beauty really is everything and in everything.
Shame on you. by the time you finished reading this review you could’ve been half-way through the book by now.
Andrew Klaven is a man who understands and clearly communicates why Western Civilization matters, it’s not about Geography, it’s about everything that is good and holy in this world, the tradition that is based on the Bible and what Jesus Christ did for us on the cross.
Klaven is honest and comical in a way that is relatable and disarming, the book is brilliant and deep without compromising it’s accessibility and without feeling pedantic, and he has done what few non-fiction writers have achieved: his work is a story. It takes you on the journey (the story) of thought and philosophy and the word made flesh.
My favorite chapters were Unhallowed Arts (Mary Shelley) and The Songs of Spring (Keats). Most of the points he brings to life about literature completely opened my mind and put Romanticism in a new perspective for me while still building on what I already loved about it.
Frankenstein is my favorite book (if a reader can even have just one) and I had an understanding that it was deeply rooted in Paradise Lost and the authors mothers feminist views, and that there was a definite emphasis on women. But in Unhallowed Arts he revealed so much more to me, it was like all the dots I saw on the page were finally connected more cohesively than ever before, like I was falling in love with the book all over again.
Let me also add (perhaps this is the most important part) that you do not need any previous knowledge of anything to read this book, with maybe the exception of literacy. He doesn’t bore those who already love the Romantic movement well with dumbed-down recaps but doesn’t talk so lofty that those who have the brains of a baby Idaho potato couldn’t fully understand and love it too. Edit: I take it back, an Idaho potato could not understand this book, I read some of the negative reviews and there are clearly some Idaho Potatoes in this world.
One last point: how would one put this book in any one genre? It does not rabbit trail yet seems about everything all at once. I think that speaks volumes to this: Truth and Beauty really is everything and in everything.
Shame on you. by the time you finished reading this review you could’ve been half-way through the book by now.
April 5, 2026
I really enjoyed this book, especially the first 2/3 where Klavan focuses on the literature of the Romantic era.
I loved his elaboration on the famous dinner party of 1817 with Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, Haydon, and Monkhouse. Also the assessment of the critical encounters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Wordsworth, and then later Keats, and how his influence transformed their poetry in significant ways. Klavan’s discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley is also fascinating, especially his literary analysis of Frankenstein. Klaven also takes the time to analyze the first movie adaptation, as well as a number of other relevant films. His expertise in this area really shines, as expected. He also intersperses commentary on Hamlet and Macbeth which is super interesting.
Halfway through this book I was prepared to give it 5 stars, but in the final third he shifted gears and I found this section less compelling. I think the book would have been better overall (and perhaps better received) had Klavan been able to refrain from the occasional political jibes, but I guess he couldn’t help himself.
Tom wrote a great review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Overall, it’s still a great read—highly recommended!
Quotes:
Today, as the Romantics feared, we are all materialists in one sense or another. Just listen to how we talk. Instead of saying, "The rollercoaster ride made me excited," we say, "I had an adrenaline rush." Instead of saying, "Running makes me feel great," we say, "Running gives me a dopamine high." We say, "I have depression"—I hear this all the time—rather than, "I am depressed." We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means.
[p 67]
“But I don't think this is what the novel is about at all. What fascinates me about the story, anyway—what makes it great both for itself and as the source material for all the many works it has inspired over more than two centuries—is not that Victor Frankenstein usurps the rights of God. After all, in fashioning a new creature out of corpses, he does no more than what men have always done: he makes new life out of existing materials.
“To me, the greatness of the story, the horror of the story, and the threat to humanity the story portrays lie in the fact that Frankenstein has usurped the power not of God but of women. He has made a man without a mother. His science has eliminated the principle of femininity from the creation of human life.”
[p 75-6]
‘If instead of being a famous French philosopher, Rousseau [who famously wrote “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains”] had wanted to speak the truth, he might have said something more like this: "We are born naked, but we are everywhere in clothes."
‘Civilization is a costumed play in which we act out traditions built upon our human nature. That nature is no blank slate at all: it is fleshly, it is gendered, it is full of inequalities and idiot desires that must be curtailed. Society is humanity's attempt to organize what it finds beautiful in itself into a performance of the Logos. There is no wholly logical reason why women should adorn themselves one way and men another, why priests or judges should wear costumes others don't, why we should exchange rings at weddings or splash water on our heads at our conversion. These customs are, at their best, a kind of poetry with which we express the truth and beauty of the human condition that cannot be expressed otherwise.’
[p 207]
I loved his elaboration on the famous dinner party of 1817 with Wordsworth, Keats, Lamb, Haydon, and Monkhouse. Also the assessment of the critical encounters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge with Wordsworth, and then later Keats, and how his influence transformed their poetry in significant ways. Klavan’s discussion of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley is also fascinating, especially his literary analysis of Frankenstein. Klaven also takes the time to analyze the first movie adaptation, as well as a number of other relevant films. His expertise in this area really shines, as expected. He also intersperses commentary on Hamlet and Macbeth which is super interesting.
Halfway through this book I was prepared to give it 5 stars, but in the final third he shifted gears and I found this section less compelling. I think the book would have been better overall (and perhaps better received) had Klavan been able to refrain from the occasional political jibes, but I guess he couldn’t help himself.
Tom wrote a great review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Overall, it’s still a great read—highly recommended!
Quotes:
Today, as the Romantics feared, we are all materialists in one sense or another. Just listen to how we talk. Instead of saying, "The rollercoaster ride made me excited," we say, "I had an adrenaline rush." Instead of saying, "Running makes me feel great," we say, "Running gives me a dopamine high." We say, "I have depression"—I hear this all the time—rather than, "I am depressed." We speak as if our emotions were chemical reactions rather than spiritual reactions communicated to our bodies by chemical means.
[p 67]
“But I don't think this is what the novel is about at all. What fascinates me about the story, anyway—what makes it great both for itself and as the source material for all the many works it has inspired over more than two centuries—is not that Victor Frankenstein usurps the rights of God. After all, in fashioning a new creature out of corpses, he does no more than what men have always done: he makes new life out of existing materials.
“To me, the greatness of the story, the horror of the story, and the threat to humanity the story portrays lie in the fact that Frankenstein has usurped the power not of God but of women. He has made a man without a mother. His science has eliminated the principle of femininity from the creation of human life.”
[p 75-6]
‘If instead of being a famous French philosopher, Rousseau [who famously wrote “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains”] had wanted to speak the truth, he might have said something more like this: "We are born naked, but we are everywhere in clothes."
‘Civilization is a costumed play in which we act out traditions built upon our human nature. That nature is no blank slate at all: it is fleshly, it is gendered, it is full of inequalities and idiot desires that must be curtailed. Society is humanity's attempt to organize what it finds beautiful in itself into a performance of the Logos. There is no wholly logical reason why women should adorn themselves one way and men another, why priests or judges should wear costumes others don't, why we should exchange rings at weddings or splash water on our heads at our conversion. These customs are, at their best, a kind of poetry with which we express the truth and beauty of the human condition that cannot be expressed otherwise.’
[p 207]
June 23, 2022
Beauty descends from God into nature, but there it would perish and does except when a Man appreciates it with worship and thus as it were sends it back to God: so that through his consciousness what descended ascends again and the perfect circle is made." — C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur GreavesThis entire book is Andrew Klavan discovering what Lewis describes above and then fleshing it out using examples from poetry and other written art. Along the way we get the lives of some of the poets and then Klavan's own deeper dive into the Gospels.
I picked this up from the library on the strength of the enthusiastic comments from The Literary Life podcast folks who were working their way through it. I agreed with them as I read the first half and don't think they'd gotten to Klavan's commentary on the Gospels yet which I occasionally found problematic. I myself sometimes found Klavan's Gospel interpretations to be uncomfortably far afield from my own understanding. I haven't gone to the trouble of learning Greek, as Klavan did, but I have read a wide number of commentaries from people who knew the Greek themselves. That is a fairly small quibble though.
This is a book that opens your eyes to the power of art, nature, and our own imaginations in finding and furthering our personal friendship with Christ. That's the part that spoke to me. I read it in two days and it definitely is a book I'll reread.
April 20, 2022
This book is truly beautiful. The nexus of history, biography, poetry, politics, theology, and memoir, provide a deeply compelling narrative that is sure to add to your "want to read" list. The transcendental exploration will leave you seeing God, nature, and yourself differently. For me they are all more real and more symbolic than they were before. I can't recommend this enough. So I must say, thank you Mr. Klavan for the truth and beauty you've shown me.
April 16, 2022
I give out quite a few 5 star reviews, I tend to read the sort of books that I like and when I like a book I give it a high rating, but after reading this I feel like I should go and lower the reviews of many of the other books I've rated because this is in a league of its own.
Andrew Klavan's understanding of the Gospels is quite amazing, he was a reluctant convert in his 40s and not baptized until he was 49, he had to explore a lot of wrong paths before he stumbled down the right path.
In this, his second book on faith he relates the romantic poets, and what they were grappling with to what we are grappling with today and how both show the truth of the Gospels and the words of Jesus.
Andrew Klavan's understanding of the Gospels is quite amazing, he was a reluctant convert in his 40s and not baptized until he was 49, he had to explore a lot of wrong paths before he stumbled down the right path.
In this, his second book on faith he relates the romantic poets, and what they were grappling with to what we are grappling with today and how both show the truth of the Gospels and the words of Jesus.
December 26, 2022
The subtitle is exceedingly misleading. If it read “The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of Andrew Klavan’s Political Beliefs” I still would have picked the book up and probably would have enjoyed it more.
The information about the lives and works of the Romantic Poets was interesting, but entirely unrelated from the “deeper understanding of the words of Jesus” that he tries to pull together in the last chapter.
The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Klavan about is a quote from page 6 of this book: “I’m not a theologian. I’m not a pastor. You mustn’t trust your salvation to me. It’ll just get you into trouble.”
The information about the lives and works of the Romantic Poets was interesting, but entirely unrelated from the “deeper understanding of the words of Jesus” that he tries to pull together in the last chapter.
The one thing I wholeheartedly agree with Klavan about is a quote from page 6 of this book: “I’m not a theologian. I’m not a pastor. You mustn’t trust your salvation to me. It’ll just get you into trouble.”
August 7, 2023
"Maybe your problem is that you're trying to understand Jesus as a philosophy instead of as he truly is: a person."
Klavan says that these are "the wisest words anyone has ever said" to him.
What does that have to do with England's greatest poets (and human sexuality and modern science fiction and even the Sermon on the Mount)? Everything, Klavan thinks. The thesis/subtitle is striking and the book only gets better from there. There was less here of their poetry than I expected and more of their biographies/historical context -- which helps me understand their poetry better.
I think I need to read more of England's greatest poets. And I think I want to read more from Andrew Klavan.
Klavan says that these are "the wisest words anyone has ever said" to him.
What does that have to do with England's greatest poets (and human sexuality and modern science fiction and even the Sermon on the Mount)? Everything, Klavan thinks. The thesis/subtitle is striking and the book only gets better from there. There was less here of their poetry than I expected and more of their biographies/historical context -- which helps me understand their poetry better.
I think I need to read more of England's greatest poets. And I think I want to read more from Andrew Klavan.
August 15, 2022
I'm glad I read his memoir first, since that helps so much of this book make sense. It's kind of hard to label this book. There are parts that are history, part literary analyis, part worldview discussion...
So, I'm not sure where I'd shelve it, but I did thoroughly enjoy reading it and found it thought provoking and interesting.
So, I'm not sure where I'd shelve it, but I did thoroughly enjoy reading it and found it thought provoking and interesting.
August 3, 2022
TLDR: a decent resource for information and various insights about romantic poetry, but outlandish and terribly written as a critical work. I would strongly advise that if you are interested in this book for its advertised premise, do not read it.
I never write reviews, however I cannot in good conscience see that this book has 4.4 stars on here and not say anything.
First, know that is genuinely saddens me to be writing this. The subtitle of this book, “How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus,” is what piqued my interest. I am intensely passionate about the place of art in faith, and Klavan did indeed have many important things to say about this subject. However, they were so poorly expressed, so poorly reasoned, so dilapidated in presentation that he could hardly be said to have done the subject justice.
A large portion of this book is a good resource for people without the most exposure to romantic poetry, which I assume is Klavan’s usual audience. This is one of its redeeming qualities. He does a good job of explaining the context of the great poets, highlighting key ideas and events of the time that had a direct impact on their lives; I did actually learn a few really great things!
But beyond this, the book is a pain to read; it took me two months if not more to get through because of how convoluted it was. It’s heartbreaking to say because you can tell from the depth of Klavan’s knowledge that he really did spend years studying and consuming romantic literature, but this was done without a proper training in critical thinking or analysis.
The primary issue is a lack of analytical skill, that he draws conclusions and connections from poems that no educated person would be permitted to draw. My personal favorite is that the industrial revolution is sexist because women are divine spirits of femininity and that is actually the moral of Frankenstein. Or another: Owen Barfield’s analysis of language and how ancient language often unified spirit and matter is somehow related to the moral of Macbeth. Even more ridiculous: that official scientists are the ones theorizing that the world is a simulation (rather than nut-jobs from their parents’ basement) because they are unwilling to accept immaterial truth and the role of consciousness in the world. And the dumb-fuckiest of all: Ephesians 5 is actually saying that the man should be the bread-winner and the wife should be the homemaker, that this unification in marriage is the image of divine Logos in us, and it is somehow exemplified in the relationship between Mary (Jesus’s mother) and Jesus. You lost yet? Yeah. He makes these lofty arguments using intelligent sounding words in tandem with intelligent sounding information, which all really just reeks of pretentiousness and to me reveals that he is way out of his depth.
Beyond this, the issue comes down to critical thinking skills, or at the very least the lack of logical expression. In over 2/3 of the book, Klavan’s rabbit trails and strange connections are usually not at all beneficial to what he claims to be his driving point. He will sometimes even bring in completely irrelevant hot button topics that do nothing but stir the pot. What his goal is here I cannot say. Further, he often jumps from one point to the next with unmitigated speed so that one point rarely feels like it follows from his previous, not giving his readers enough space to process his points and see how they relate to each other. Sometimes—and this is the kicker—the whiplash is due to legitimate logical fallacy, equivocation, and even self-contradiction. It reads like a man’s wandering musings rather than a structured, developed exegesis.
It breaks my heart that this is the case. What Klavan is grasping at is so valuable. So many of his ideas are crucial to how I understand God and the world around me. But instead he just makes himself sound ridiculous—like he’s sexist, racist, and a little stupid, ignorant of really anything beyond the few books he’s read, like he has more to say about the world than about Jesus, like he’s never written an essay in his life, never taken a logic class, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I am trying to be charitable but I am obviously fed up about it.
This is a decent jumping off point for people who have never been exposed to romantic poetry, but if you are genuinely looking for that exposure, please, for crying out loud, look somewhere else. Watch a video essay on YouTube, take a class, read something by an actual scholar, do not waste your time with this.
I never write reviews, however I cannot in good conscience see that this book has 4.4 stars on here and not say anything.
First, know that is genuinely saddens me to be writing this. The subtitle of this book, “How the Lives and Works of England’s Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus,” is what piqued my interest. I am intensely passionate about the place of art in faith, and Klavan did indeed have many important things to say about this subject. However, they were so poorly expressed, so poorly reasoned, so dilapidated in presentation that he could hardly be said to have done the subject justice.
A large portion of this book is a good resource for people without the most exposure to romantic poetry, which I assume is Klavan’s usual audience. This is one of its redeeming qualities. He does a good job of explaining the context of the great poets, highlighting key ideas and events of the time that had a direct impact on their lives; I did actually learn a few really great things!
But beyond this, the book is a pain to read; it took me two months if not more to get through because of how convoluted it was. It’s heartbreaking to say because you can tell from the depth of Klavan’s knowledge that he really did spend years studying and consuming romantic literature, but this was done without a proper training in critical thinking or analysis.
The primary issue is a lack of analytical skill, that he draws conclusions and connections from poems that no educated person would be permitted to draw. My personal favorite is that the industrial revolution is sexist because women are divine spirits of femininity and that is actually the moral of Frankenstein. Or another: Owen Barfield’s analysis of language and how ancient language often unified spirit and matter is somehow related to the moral of Macbeth. Even more ridiculous: that official scientists are the ones theorizing that the world is a simulation (rather than nut-jobs from their parents’ basement) because they are unwilling to accept immaterial truth and the role of consciousness in the world. And the dumb-fuckiest of all: Ephesians 5 is actually saying that the man should be the bread-winner and the wife should be the homemaker, that this unification in marriage is the image of divine Logos in us, and it is somehow exemplified in the relationship between Mary (Jesus’s mother) and Jesus. You lost yet? Yeah. He makes these lofty arguments using intelligent sounding words in tandem with intelligent sounding information, which all really just reeks of pretentiousness and to me reveals that he is way out of his depth.
Beyond this, the issue comes down to critical thinking skills, or at the very least the lack of logical expression. In over 2/3 of the book, Klavan’s rabbit trails and strange connections are usually not at all beneficial to what he claims to be his driving point. He will sometimes even bring in completely irrelevant hot button topics that do nothing but stir the pot. What his goal is here I cannot say. Further, he often jumps from one point to the next with unmitigated speed so that one point rarely feels like it follows from his previous, not giving his readers enough space to process his points and see how they relate to each other. Sometimes—and this is the kicker—the whiplash is due to legitimate logical fallacy, equivocation, and even self-contradiction. It reads like a man’s wandering musings rather than a structured, developed exegesis.
It breaks my heart that this is the case. What Klavan is grasping at is so valuable. So many of his ideas are crucial to how I understand God and the world around me. But instead he just makes himself sound ridiculous—like he’s sexist, racist, and a little stupid, ignorant of really anything beyond the few books he’s read, like he has more to say about the world than about Jesus, like he’s never written an essay in his life, never taken a logic class, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I am trying to be charitable but I am obviously fed up about it.
This is a decent jumping off point for people who have never been exposed to romantic poetry, but if you are genuinely looking for that exposure, please, for crying out loud, look somewhere else. Watch a video essay on YouTube, take a class, read something by an actual scholar, do not waste your time with this.
August 31, 2023
Giving it five stars doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with everything, and I'm not claiming to understand everything that he's talking about either, but this book made me look at the world in an entirely new way. I'm struggling to express myself about it. I tried to write a poem that was inspired by his ideas but it met a rapid and untimely death, even after emergency surgery. It is currently on life support.
Here are a few quotes from the book:
"The purpose of poetry, Barfield says, is to reunite the language of the physical with the language of the spiritual in our minds, and so recreate the original human experience of the physical and the spiritual as one thing."
"In some sense, all language is metaphor. The word love is not love itself; it's a small term we used to describe the vast experience. And since, as Hamlet teaches us, our lives are the language of the meaning of our lives, so our lives are a metaphor"
"At this point, I think it is actually more plausible to believe that matter is the spoken word of the One Great Mind than that it is simply itself. Mathematics would not work if this were not so--it would have no underlying idea to which to refer. Truth, morality, and beauty. Likewise- they would be smoke and illusion as the materialists say they are. But they're not. Math, truth, morality, and beauty are all ways in which our minds translate matter into meaning-- the Logos--the meaning and the consciousness of the great mind"
"Such a person, the embodied Word, would be the clear mirror which shows us the image of moral reality we now see only darkly. He would be the silent presence of the truth the language of our lives can only roughly express and he would be inexpressible except as a presence, as story, as a living metaphor for himself."
"Matter is the language of the Logos. Our lives are meant to express the truth and beauty which is woven into the fabric of God's creation. But like all languages, matter is a rude tool that cannot wholly express, but can only hint at, the silent fullness of reality. There are always gaps between the truth of things and our expression of the truth."
Here are a few quotes from the book:
"The purpose of poetry, Barfield says, is to reunite the language of the physical with the language of the spiritual in our minds, and so recreate the original human experience of the physical and the spiritual as one thing."
"In some sense, all language is metaphor. The word love is not love itself; it's a small term we used to describe the vast experience. And since, as Hamlet teaches us, our lives are the language of the meaning of our lives, so our lives are a metaphor"
"At this point, I think it is actually more plausible to believe that matter is the spoken word of the One Great Mind than that it is simply itself. Mathematics would not work if this were not so--it would have no underlying idea to which to refer. Truth, morality, and beauty. Likewise- they would be smoke and illusion as the materialists say they are. But they're not. Math, truth, morality, and beauty are all ways in which our minds translate matter into meaning-- the Logos--the meaning and the consciousness of the great mind"
"Such a person, the embodied Word, would be the clear mirror which shows us the image of moral reality we now see only darkly. He would be the silent presence of the truth the language of our lives can only roughly express and he would be inexpressible except as a presence, as story, as a living metaphor for himself."
"Matter is the language of the Logos. Our lives are meant to express the truth and beauty which is woven into the fabric of God's creation. But like all languages, matter is a rude tool that cannot wholly express, but can only hint at, the silent fullness of reality. There are always gaps between the truth of things and our expression of the truth."
October 22, 2022
There were some interesting parts and things to ponder, but I don't feel like it actually lived up to the premise. I also wonder if I would have appreciated it more as an audiobook narrated by the author. He has a unique writing style, and I loved his memoir, The Great Good Thing. But the same writing style just didn't quite work for me in this book, at least not in print.
February 17, 2025
Baptize the stories.
That’s the sentiment I get reading this book. Everything good and true has a way of directing us to Christ and it is no less true than with the three Romantic poets plus Mary Shelly Klavan highlights. The book is very witty, and I value it mostly for the first and second parts of three where Klavan describes in the familiar detail only an ardent admirer may have the lives and works of Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. If you’ve listened to his show as long as I have, then you will doubtlessly recognize some of points Klavan makes. However, I value the story told about the tragic lives of these three, how they were shaped both by art and by the crazy lives lived. Reading that in the context of discovering Christ in an age famous for moving away from such “superstition” is valuable. Definitely would recommend as now I need to acquire some poetry collections.
That’s the sentiment I get reading this book. Everything good and true has a way of directing us to Christ and it is no less true than with the three Romantic poets plus Mary Shelly Klavan highlights. The book is very witty, and I value it mostly for the first and second parts of three where Klavan describes in the familiar detail only an ardent admirer may have the lives and works of Coleridge, Keats, and Wordsworth. If you’ve listened to his show as long as I have, then you will doubtlessly recognize some of points Klavan makes. However, I value the story told about the tragic lives of these three, how they were shaped both by art and by the crazy lives lived. Reading that in the context of discovering Christ in an age famous for moving away from such “superstition” is valuable. Definitely would recommend as now I need to acquire some poetry collections.
August 3, 2025
This book doesn't easily fit a genre. It has a lot of thoughts in it. They are organised. A few bits got abstract and made my eyes glaze over (esp in the last main section of the book, which was more theory). But then, so does Percy Shelley, one of the Romantic poets starring in the narrative sections (which made parts 1 and 2 of the book go down easy). Many more bits than that got underlined. Read this book if you want a highly intelligent autodidact Christian who's read voraciously opine, probably more sensibly than you, about the meaning of the universe.
July 19, 2022
This was rough. I almost wanted to give it two stars because I like the dreamy way he describes some of the romantic poets lives at the beginning of the book. But it is so, so bad. Klavan seems like a stubborn, angry, narrow-minded, judgmental old man to me, who used this avenue to speak his mind. This book is dripping with condescension, griping, biting sarcasm, and disdain for those who do not see things the way exactly like Klavan does. There is no talk of truth or beauty, just of "the way things are because that's why." I thought it was a nice challenge to read it all the way through, even though on multiple occasions I was seething with anger for the narrow-mindedness and mean-spiritedness the author exhibits.
There are some things in the end of the book I would have liked in my days of closer adherence to an orthodox kind of faith, but they are packaged among so much judgment and fear of change/progress that they become less impactful to read.
I recommend not reading this book and spending your time doing more edifying things with your life.
There are some things in the end of the book I would have liked in my days of closer adherence to an orthodox kind of faith, but they are packaged among so much judgment and fear of change/progress that they become less impactful to read.
I recommend not reading this book and spending your time doing more edifying things with your life.
May 2, 2022
I was thoroughly disappointed with this book. It's not a complete one-star, but I was definitely expecting more. With the subtitle, you would expect a connection between the English poets and the Gospels. However, there was a section on how the English poets were all 1960s-style feminists and another section on the Gospels and no real connection. Some of his thoughts were very profound, but the book did not flow well or even live up to its title.
April 17, 2022
i wish i could rate this higher. i have about seven people i recommended it to and now i’m just starstruck and in love.
Read
May 7, 2026I thought this was a pretty interesting, and mostly convincing attempt to link the 19th century Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge) to basic Christian concepts. None of these writers were conventionally religious but their deep transformations resulting from their immersion in nature brought them, Klavan contends, to similar insights expressed by Christ.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
are the closing lines from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and points in the direction of nature having meanings that transcend the literal details t of what we see, much as Christ, especially in his haiku-like parables, urges the listener toward spiritual truths.
Klavan comments on the LYRICAL BALLADS, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 collaborative collection of poems:
“The idea of the book was this. If the purpose of poetry is to reunite flesh an spirit, nature and meaning through the human imagination, the two poets would approach that purpose
from its two opposing poles. Coleridge would bring the imagination of man into nature, and Wordsworth would recreate nature in the image of man’s imagination.”
The important point here is that nature has a significance that is found beyond itself – in the imagination of the perceiver. In Coleridge’s well known “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the mariner, after experiencing nature in its various form, some painful, emerges a changed man. Similarly, in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” the flowers evoke both feelings of joy and sadness.
The same pattern is at work in the Biblical stories of Christ’s life. His actions, his miracles, and finally his death are not just isolated events. Rather, they evoke trans formative feelings that keep reverberating through the centuries. But these feelings, however they may be expressed (for example, followers may use the language of being filled with the Holy Spirit) can only come about through the use of the imagination, the same kind of imagination that the Romantic poets talk about.
The “use of the imagination” may sound a little slippery as to how it works. Klavan explains it in term of how the mind works, a basic metaphorical process:
“A metaphor has three parts: the object we ae trying to describe, the term we use to describe it, and the idea that is conveyed when the two come together. . .”
Applied to a basic Christian concept, the Trinity, if we try to describe an ultimate reality that we call the “Father God”, then we can compare it to Jesus, the “Son God” and when and if we really grasp that link in all of its connotations, then we are filled with understanding and “Spirit God.”
That’s oversimplifying Klavan, of course, who goes into much more detail, but I hope a reader gets the general idea. I think he’s written a intriguing book about how poetry and religion are inextricably bound together.
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
are the closing lines from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and points in the direction of nature having meanings that transcend the literal details t of what we see, much as Christ, especially in his haiku-like parables, urges the listener toward spiritual truths.
Klavan comments on the LYRICAL BALLADS, Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 collaborative collection of poems:
“The idea of the book was this. If the purpose of poetry is to reunite flesh an spirit, nature and meaning through the human imagination, the two poets would approach that purpose
from its two opposing poles. Coleridge would bring the imagination of man into nature, and Wordsworth would recreate nature in the image of man’s imagination.”
The important point here is that nature has a significance that is found beyond itself – in the imagination of the perceiver. In Coleridge’s well known “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” the mariner, after experiencing nature in its various form, some painful, emerges a changed man. Similarly, in Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud,” the flowers evoke both feelings of joy and sadness.
The same pattern is at work in the Biblical stories of Christ’s life. His actions, his miracles, and finally his death are not just isolated events. Rather, they evoke trans formative feelings that keep reverberating through the centuries. But these feelings, however they may be expressed (for example, followers may use the language of being filled with the Holy Spirit) can only come about through the use of the imagination, the same kind of imagination that the Romantic poets talk about.
The “use of the imagination” may sound a little slippery as to how it works. Klavan explains it in term of how the mind works, a basic metaphorical process:
“A metaphor has three parts: the object we ae trying to describe, the term we use to describe it, and the idea that is conveyed when the two come together. . .”
Applied to a basic Christian concept, the Trinity, if we try to describe an ultimate reality that we call the “Father God”, then we can compare it to Jesus, the “Son God” and when and if we really grasp that link in all of its connotations, then we are filled with understanding and “Spirit God.”
That’s oversimplifying Klavan, of course, who goes into much more detail, but I hope a reader gets the general idea. I think he’s written a intriguing book about how poetry and religion are inextricably bound together.
June 28, 2025
This was a re-read. It's delightful as an audiobook, but I needed to read the physical copy. Klavan's ideas and meditations on the nature of matter, reality, truth, and the Logos struck me the first time as profound but beyond my grasp—possibly just barely-sane sophistry (Coleridge himself was not altogether mentally normal, after all).
They stuck with me though, niggling at the back of my mind, when I read Coleridge's biography by Guite. Finally, they began to make just a little bit of sense when I re-read this book while digesting Michael Jones's apologetics work on quantum theory as an argument for God. Klavan actually briefly mentions quantum theory and its implications in the last section of this book. It seems Wordsworth and the Romantics were onto something in their fight against naturalism and the materialistic assumptions of their "age of reason." I doubt they would've dreamed that the physics and mathematics to which they drank "confusion" at their famous toast would eventually lead back to the eternal Word and the very meaning that they were trying to get hold of.
I've never been more wonderstruck at science (in spite of my paltry understanding of its disciplines) or grateful for poetry—especially the Christian mystics and the Romantics.
They stuck with me though, niggling at the back of my mind, when I read Coleridge's biography by Guite. Finally, they began to make just a little bit of sense when I re-read this book while digesting Michael Jones's apologetics work on quantum theory as an argument for God. Klavan actually briefly mentions quantum theory and its implications in the last section of this book. It seems Wordsworth and the Romantics were onto something in their fight against naturalism and the materialistic assumptions of their "age of reason." I doubt they would've dreamed that the physics and mathematics to which they drank "confusion" at their famous toast would eventually lead back to the eternal Word and the very meaning that they were trying to get hold of.
I've never been more wonderstruck at science (in spite of my paltry understanding of its disciplines) or grateful for poetry—especially the Christian mystics and the Romantics.
July 26, 2025
I really enjoyed this book, not least because it made me feel like an English major again. It was nice to delve in the lives and works of Wordsworth and Shelley and Keats. It brought me back to those classes, the thoughts I used to have about these poems, to wandering the Lake District, to being in the room where Keats died in Italy, all in the best ways. It was nice to reflect on them in a new way.
I wouldn't mind rereading it again when my mental faculties are better than they are now in this life state, but maybe that day will never come! Though on that note, my favorite chapter was probably his chapter on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and the role of the feminine. "The unique power of the feminine, then, is not just to confer life on matter but to infuse life with creative humanity. Even God, when he wanted to become human, chose for himself a mother."
I wouldn't mind rereading it again when my mental faculties are better than they are now in this life state, but maybe that day will never come! Though on that note, my favorite chapter was probably his chapter on Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and the role of the feminine. "The unique power of the feminine, then, is not just to confer life on matter but to infuse life with creative humanity. Even God, when he wanted to become human, chose for himself a mother."
December 13, 2022
This was a really interesting collection of non-fiction essays. I think I was expecting a little more of a textbook argument or comparison style set of essays, and this wasn't really that. It was more of an exploration of ideas about different authors and their ideals crossing over with those of Jesus throughout the Bible and the ideals He taught. This book reads like sitting in someone's living room talking over heavy concepts with a pot of tea. Definitely not for everyone, but interesting to think about or think back on even when the conversation has ended.
August 11, 2024
Truth bombs all throughout make this a really great deep read, and the historical context is fascinating. Setting up the Romantic period against the Industrialization of the West was such a fixating concept, he builds a great case for that as backlash against de-humanizing all industry, especially the work of women. Way to go!
May 4, 2022
This book was not what I expected. The title made it seem like it would be an examination of English literature and poetry through the lens of religion. This is not that book.
I hated the first 2/3 which seemed just a random history of various English poets. Some or their works were discussed, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but other then that I had no interest.
The final 1/3 is about the gospels. This was a bit more interesting, but at this point too little too late. This almost felt like 2 separate books that were jammed together.
Maybe I missed something. But did not enjoy. Although I did finish, hence the 2 stars.
I hated the first 2/3 which seemed just a random history of various English poets. Some or their works were discussed, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, but other then that I had no interest.
The final 1/3 is about the gospels. This was a bit more interesting, but at this point too little too late. This almost felt like 2 separate books that were jammed together.
Maybe I missed something. But did not enjoy. Although I did finish, hence the 2 stars.
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