Andrew Klavan - The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of Englands Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus

Andrew Klavan has written a stunningly original work that defies classification by genre. It is, at once, literary, philosophical, and deeply Christianand, for all those reasons, personally enriching. Klavan tells how the English Romantic poetsColeridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and othersset about to use the artistic imagination to salvage mans instinctive knowledge of the supernatural just as materialistic philosophy was taking root in European intellectual circles during the early nineteenth century.

Klavan, a master storyteller, provides a fascinating and informative short history of these literary giants. In the process, he explains why their poetry is important and how it helped to reveal that this seemingly indifferent universe is, in fact, a personal creators act of love. Then, in a theological finale, he applies the insights of the great poets to illuminate the true meaning of some of the most challenging aspects of the teachings of Christ.

The Truth and Beauty is full of insight about romantic love and human mortality, the perils of utopian politics, the nature of men and women, the meaning of life and the moral order, science and the possibility of knowledge, and especially, the teachings of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels. Not since reading C. S. Lewiss The Great Divorce in college has a single book induced such deep and constructive theological reflection in me, as I suspect it will for many other readers.

STEPHEN C. MEYER, PhD, author, Return of the God Hypothesis:Three Scientific Discoveries That Reveal the Mind behind the Universe; director, Center for Science and Culture, Discovery Institute, Seattle

What have the Romantic poets to do with Jerusalem? Quite a lot, it turns out. Andrew Klavan has long since secured his spot as one of the most brilliant writers of our age. In The Truth and Beauty, Klavans cultural insight and eloquence shine as never before. The Romantics lived, as we do, in a time of disenchantment and unbelief. Through a deeply personal telling of his relationship with long-dead poets and the God who made both us and them, Klavan gently guides his readers away from the illusions of our age back toward the transcendentals.

MICHAEL KNOWLES, author, no. 1 national bestselling Speechless; host, The Michael Knowles Show

We live in a disenchanted world, a world of commodities and stuff that simply do not satisfy the intrinsic human craving for meaning and transcendence. Even the church can too often be driven by prosaic consumerism and not by the great mysteries of life. This is, strange to tell, where some of the great giants of English literature, especially the Romantics, can help us. They may not have offered the right answers, but they did grasp something of the mystery of existence. In this book, Andrew Klavan uses these great writers as foils for discussing the deeper questions of life, questions which he shows are answered only in Christ. For those who love both Christ and great literature, as Andrew Klavan clearly does, this book is a delight and a means to that most important of things: the reenchantment of our world.

CARL R. TRUEMAN, professor, biblical and religious studies, Grove City College; fellow, Ethics and Public Policy Center, D.C.

Poetry and literature point to the sacred. Andrew Klavan reminds us how.

DR. JORDAN B. PETERSON, author, international bestselling Maps of Meaning, Twelve Rules for Life, and Beyond Order

You dont have to be a Christian to appreciate much of the timeless wisdom Andrew Klavan presents in The Truth and Beauty. Klavan is a magnificent writer, a person of wisdom, and a man of compassionall of which shine through here.

BEN SHAPIRO, editor emeritus, DailyWire; host, The Ben Shapiro Show

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The Truth and Beauty

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For Nathan Edward Moore,

a loving welcome

W hen I was planning this book, it was my dream to revisit some of the locations in which the events I describe take place. I imagined myself traveling back to the homes of Wordsworth and Coleridge in the English Lake District and to the Keats-Shelley museum that now occupies the Roman rooms where John Keats died. Perhaps I would see some of the original writings of these poets in their own hands, and speak with the curators who watch over them. But when the pandemic of 2020 struck and the world shut down, all my travel and speaking engagements were canceled, and I decided it would be wise to seize the tragic moment to do the work that had been haunting me for years. As a result, what I hoped to have accomplished on location and in the company of scholars was done in a workshop the size of an outhouse with a computer and a collection of my own decaying books strewn about the desk and floor. And while I always tried to use those tools to track down the original sources I cited, I was also always dependent upon and indebted to the scholarship of specialists who directed me to those sources. I could not have written this book if there were no M. H. Abrams or Jacques Barzun, Richard Holmes or Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Jackson Bate or Juliet Barker or all the other biographers, critics, and historians whom I tried to credit in the bibliography. It was very important to me to acknowledge their work, but at the same time, I was concerned not to involve them in my own sometimes unpopular points of view. I therefore cited them only in notes when a quotation or insight came from them specifically. If at any point I failed to mention someone deserving of credit, let me say simply that all the facts reported here were originally gathered by better scholars than myself. Only the interpretations of those facts are mine.