Author Andrew Klavan Pulls People in With 'The Truth and the Beauty'
Automatic TRANSCRIPT
Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Andrew clavin with a K into clavin has written a weird, wild, wonderful genius book. It's called the truth in beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus. Now, Andrew, I'm a poetry guy, I'm an English literature guy, but what you do here in this book, which I think all the best books do is you introduce people who aren't poetry guys or English. You pull people in. And I want to embarras you further and say that you're a great writer. You're writing is great. The ideas are amazing, but the writing itself. Right in the beginning, you use the word Kaka lorem. And I thought, I'm in. Whatever he's selling, I'm in with this guy, but there are words throughout the book that are just like these brilliant archaic, funny words and stuff. So let's talk about the guts of this. How in the world do you go from actually no, explain to my audience if you would, who were the romantic poets? Just because it's your understanding of the history of romanticism and that movement, which I think I had forgotten 85% of what you say in here. So it's kind of an amazing primer on literary history and history. So talk about that because it's fascinating. Because the thing you usually hear about the romantics was there was an age of reason and everybody was reasonable and then the romantics came and they reacted and they didn't like reason. They wanted to have a motion, which is utter nonsense. That's not what happened at all. You know, they lived in a time that was so much like our time that it is truly uncanny. I mean, the comparisons are everywhere. They lived in a time when science was changing everything. And so people were losing their faith. The structures of the world church and state were collapsing and being shown up as unable to take them into the new era. And just to be clear, you're talking about the latter part of the 18th century. So this is the lead up to the French Revolution. I mean, the level of chaos on the continent, just hard for us to imagine what that would have been