Cultural decay has been a theme of cultural pessimists for centuries, and in this episode Jeff Rich surveys prophets of cultural doom from Matthew Arnold, Max Weber, Stefan Zweig, and the more witty and balanced Felipe Fernandez-Armesto. Poetry makes an appearance too - with Arnold's "Dover Beach", Yeats' "Second Coming", Jeff Rich's own reading of "The Burning Archive", and lastly a special guest appearance of Ezra Pound reading from his Cantos. Trust me - it all makes sense in the end.
Credits:
* The wonderful Kimiko Ishizaka and the Open Goldberg project, for the public domain recording of the Aria from J.S. Bach's Goldberg Variations https://opengoldbergvariations.org/
* Ezra Pound, reading from Canto 81 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0wc28wK7S0
* Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach
* W.B. Yeats, Second Coming
Read more of my writing at www.theburningarchive.com or buy my new book - Gathering Flowers of the Mind: Collected Poems 1996-2020 in print and e-book editions at major online retailers.
Check out me reading poems from the book at The Burning Archive Youtube channel
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8. Cultural decay and the meaning of the Burning Archive