The Tragedy of Orpheus and the Maenads (and A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God)

by David Lane

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Product Code: ttom
Publication date: June 2023
Pages: 118
Size: 6 x 9

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Orpheus and the Maenads A Traditional Play in Blank Verse The preternaturally great poet Orpheus has responded to the loss of his wife Eurydice to the Underworld by forsaking the society of his fellow men in Thrace, where he was a poet-king, and endlessly wandering through field and forest, using his poetic genius to lament his loss. Apollo, the god of poetry, urges him to give up his excessive mourning and return to Thrace and once more sing the deeds of the great heroes of Greece. He warns him that in the wild he inhabits there lurk the young god of wine Dionysus and his super-human female followers the Maenads, who themselves eschew the ordinary society of men and give themselves to mad ecstasies brought on by wine and who would like nothing more than to recruit Orpheus to their number. Unwilling to give up his devotion to the memory of Eurydice, Orpheus rejects the Maenads and their Master with unmeasured words of scorn, sealing his own doom. Dionysus devises a fiendish plot of revenge that goes well beyond the ancient myth. ❧ This edition also includes A Young Poet's Elegy to the Court of God, which is a poetical essay in literary criticism, though in the form of a long discourse addressed first to the angels and then to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Mr. Lane critiques the three types of Romanticism, (1) that of action (e.g., mediaeval romances), (2) that of the intellect (i.e., Mannerism), and (3) that of feeling (e.g., nineteenth-century Romanticism). Imagism is critiqued, as well as Surrealism and the like. By way of avoiding a possibly dull disquisition, Mr. Lane makes the Elegy an extended metaphor or allegory involving a journey at sea.

Review by Elizabeth Bittner (Left to Madness): The Remnant

Review by Shawn Phillip Cooper (Reclaiming the Poetic Register): The European Conservative
Mr. Lane, a resident of New York City, is the Chairman of Una Voce New York, an organization dedicated to restoring traditional Roman Catholicism, especially the traditional Latin Liturgy. He is the author of a blog, entitled "Tradition Restored", in which he posts excerpts from invaluable (public domain, out-of-print) critical writings by the foremost literary critics of the first half of the last century who defended and advanced traditional poetry and fictional prose (e.g., Irving Babbitt, P. E. More, Gilbert Murray). He believes that there is a great need for these writings, now largely forgotten, to be resurrected and disseminated to help counteract the present collapse of Western civilization. Among his poetical works, Mr. Lane has previously published two other verse plays, The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth (2012) and Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman (2016).
Praise for previously published works:

The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth

“Mr. Lane has seemingly come out of nowhere with this immensely impressive achievement. We owe it to him, we owe it to our fellow Catholics, we owe it to the English language, to read, promote and make better known The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth.

This is a poem to be savored line by line for the elegance of its composition and the richness of its expression. Lines such as these have been written for the ages: "Now, throwing o'er the sceptre royal, men seize / The pestle of democracy to mill / The family until it be a dust / Of sundered individuals that may / Be roused and huffed whence'er the wind of whim / Is setting—naked fore the stone-eyed state.... "...Democracy / Is death, an enemy just yond that door." Thus does the King's sister, Madame Elizabeth, predict not only the fate of Lewis, but that of Christian civilization at large.

Acquire this work. Read it well. Teach it to your children. Recite it aloud together with them as the play it was written to be. Use it in your home school as a tool for the rediscovery and preservation of noble diction and high themes in an age of appalling linguistic brutishness. This work belongs on your shelf of classics, somewhere near the works of Shakespeare, as a most unexpected and quite wonderful contemporary revival of a literary tradition that was buried along with Christendom itself.

Mr. Lane has seemingly come out of nowhere with this immensely impressive achievement. We owe it to him, we owe it to our fellow Catholics, we owe it to the English language, to read, promote and make better known The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth.” —Christopher A. Ferrara, Esq., Founder of The American Catholic Lawyers Association, pro-life activist, and prolific journalist.

“It is unbelievable that Mr. Lane wrote a tragedy of King Louis XVI. It is even more unbelievable that he wrote the play in blank verse, and it is overwhelmingly and delightfully shocking that he wrote the work in a mixture of archaic English drawing from words common across several hundred years of the language's development.

Mr. Lane's attempt to craft a truly beautiful work is both ennobling of his subject as complimentary as it is challenging to his reader. Mr. Lane's work is deeply and splendidly reactionary and written for the delight and edification of fellow reactionaries, but more importantly it is a tribute to a king, who, perhaps even more than the English Charles I, is a symbol of the death of an old order.” —Jesse Russell, Ph.D., writer for a variety of Catholic and secular publications.

“It is easy to become discouraged and disheartened by the current state of the arts. Appreciation of literature, art, and music in our day has almost become reduced to studying history. With the degeneration of every field of the arts on full display in what is oxymoronically referred to as modern culture, it is easy to conclude that no new art can be created in such a diseased society. Once and awhile something comes along to disprove this hypothesis (if only with an exception that proves a rule). David Lane's The Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth is just such a work.” —Professor Brian McCall, Orpha and Maurice Merrill Professor at University of Oklahoma College of Law; Editor of The Catholic Family News.

Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman

“David Lane’s verse tragedy Dido subtly adapts the classic tale from Virgil to a postmodern clash of culture—a clash between civilized people who honor reason and Natural Law and a barbarous people who give license to passion and demand child sacrifice. This clash is occurring today both globally and within our own borders. I found the play very thought-provoking.”—†Anne Barbeau Gardiner, former Professor of English literature at John Jay College, CUNY, prolific author of scholarly books and articles.

“Dipping into the Western tradition in both subject and form, David Lane in Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman weaves another thread into one of the most essential stories in Western Civilization: the tragic love of Dido for the Trojan Aeneas. Mr. Lane’s command of the emotional life of his characters is triumphantly polished, at the same time he maintains a finely tuned pathos. In Dido Mr. Lane demonstrates a mastery of blank verse, building upon a keen musical sense developed in his equally delightful Tragedy of King Lewis the Sixteenth. Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman is a rare work of civilized poetry.” —Jesse Russell, Ph.D., writer for a variety of Catholic and secular publications.

“David Lane has done it again. He has resurrected in all its glory, and without affectation, the high yet elegantly simple diction of traditional blank verse to tell a tragic tale from the Aeneid. Read Dido: The Tragedy of a Woman and you will marvel at, even envy, this achievement.” — Christopher A. Ferrara