G. K. Chesterton & His Epic Ballad

Today you will hear about an epic poem that you never knew you needed to know!

The topic is also about a man whom you may have never heard of but is by no means insignificant in history and the literary world, past and present. His wisdom and character permeate society even today, after his death 89 years ago.

G. K. Chesterton…. Do you recognize that name? Yes? No? Curious why you haven't heard of him? He was a giant of a writer during his lifetime and because he wrote so much on so many topics, he is hard to pigeonhole, as well as to argue with. Chesterton was a prolific writer, intellectual, thinker, and defender of truth and tradition, family and beauty, the poor and Christianity, education and self-sufficiency, self-employment, and independence. He wrote 100 books, hundreds of poems, contributed to 200 books, 5 novels, 5 plays, +/- 200 short stories (including the famous Father Brown mysteries), he edited his own newspaper, and wrote 4,000+ essays… (imagine writing an essay everyday for 11 years!) He wrote in all kinds of genres…. such as theology, politics, and literary criticism.

His Catholic faith deeply influenced his writings and used his wit and paradox to investigate complex issues of society, morality, and religion.  There are even modern societies that promote his work and ideas, like The Society of G. K. Chesterton, Chesterton Schools Network, the Chesterton Society at Hillsdale College, and the Philadelphia Chesterton Society.

Chesterton influenced future greats like C. S. Lewis, Mahatma Ghandi, George Orwell, Orson Wells, Alfred Hitchcock, Earnest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and J. R. R. Tolkien, just to name a few. He is considered by some to be the best writer of the 20th century (Dale Ahlquist of the Society of G. K. Chesterton).

Please sit back and enjoy my conversation with revisiting professor, Dr. Fred Putnam.

 

Favorite Resources:

• The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton (Ignatius Press)
• The Ballad of the White Horse by G. K. Chesterton (Seton Press)
• The Life of Chesterton: The Man Who Carried a Swordstick and a Pen by Holly Geirger Lee
• The Compete Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton (Wordsworth Classics)
• Chesterton Spiritual Classics Collection: Heretics, Orthodoxy, The Everlasting Man by G. K. Chesterton
• The Everyman Chesterton, edited and Introduced by Ian Ker (The Everyman Library series)
• The Golden Dragon: Alfred the Great and His Times by Alf J. Mapp
• The Dragon and the Raven by G. A. Henty
• Librivox audio recording (free)
• Project Gutenberg recording (free)
• Who is This Guy and Why Haven't I Heard of Him article by Dale Ahlquist
• Lecture 21: The Ballad of the White Horse article by Dale Ahlquist
• Why the World Still Needs G. K. Chesterton article by Shawn White
• The Society of G. K. Chesterton 

 

COMMONPLACE QUOTES

“Not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world.”

 

“Unless a man becomes the enemy of an evil, he will not even become its slave but rather its champion.” - regarding the US’s entrance into the Great War

 

“A dead thing can go with the stream, only a living thing can go against it.”

 

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

 

“There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”

 

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

 

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

 

“There is a great man who makes every man feel small. But the real great man is the man who makes every man feel great.”

 

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.”

 

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

 

“People forget how to be grateful unless they learn how to be humble.”

 

“The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.”

 

“The free man is not he who thinks all opinions equally true or false; that is not freedom but feeble-mindedness. The free man is he who sees the errors as clearly as he sees the truth.”

 

“Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.”

 

“The one thing that is never taught by any chance in the atmosphere of public schools is this: that there is a whole truth of things, and that in knowing it and speaking it we are happy.”

 

“If we do not clear the outline of the White Horse with unwearying care, grass will very soon choke it and we will lose it forever. It is not the moral tradition that keeps us, it is we who keep (or do not keep) it.” - Ekaterina Volonkhonskaia

 

. . . give a child a single valuable idea, and you have done more for his education than if you had laid upon his mind the burden of bushels of information . . . - Charlotte Mason, Volume 1: Home Education, p. 174

 

APPLICATION

1. Read or listen to The Ballad of the White Horse.
2. If you choose to listen, gather printmaking supplies and try your hand at designing a printblock of the White Horse of Enthandun/Uffington and make some greeting cards or frame it as a small wall hanging. 
3. Plan to celebrate October 26th - The Feast of Alfred the Great, at home with readings and prayers: Wisdom (Proverbs) 6:1-3, 9-12, 24-25; Psalm 21:1-7; 2 Thessalonians 2:13-17; Luke 6:43-49. Think about God's calling in your life and how you can be a noble and good leader in your homes, communities, and places of work.