The Eric Metaxas Show - Mel Gibson and Andrew Klavan (Encore)

Episode Date: April 21, 2022

Mel Gibson reveals why he unabashedly shares his faith in his movies, including "Father Stu"; then, Andrew Klavan shows "The Truth and Beauty" found in England's greatest poets. (Encore Presentation)

Folks, welcome to the Eric Mattaxas show, sponsored by Legacy Precious Metals. There's never been a better time to invest in precious metals. Visit legacy p.m.investments.com. That's legacy p.m. Investments.com. Taxis show with your host, Eric Mettaxas. Hey, Alvin, guess what? What? In a couple of minutes, we're going to play my interview with Mel Gibson.

Oh, that's great. Folks, it's coming up in this segment. Yeah. Not in the next segment. in a couple of moments, we're going to play my conversation with Mel Gibson. And I got to tell you later today, we have so much good news right now. I've got to spit this out in a couple of minutes. Mel Gibson coming up in a moment.

After that, my conversation with Andrew Claven, who has written one of the most wonderful books I've read in a very long time. It's called The Truth and Beauty. This is what we call next-level conversation. Andrew Claven, I am so excited that you get to hear this today. This is a big deal, folks. Big deal, folks. Big deal. Andrew Claven, you'll see. You probably haven't heard of him.

You might not know who he is. Oh, boy. In fact, I want to get him, I want to interview him for Socrates in the city. That would be great, yeah. It's going to be amazing. Speaking of Socrates in the city, this morning I got an email from the family of Charlie Duke. Who's Charlie Duke? only the 10th man to work to walk on the moon.

Charlie Duke, the astronaut who walked on the moon in April of 1972, we're coming up on the 50th anniversary. I want to get him on this program to celebrate the 50th anniversary of his walking on the moon. We're working on getting astronaut lunar module commander Charlie Duke in a couple of weeks. We haven't had a few of those in a while. Can you believe that? That's great. So we got Charlie Duke.

Did I mention Laura Logan? Oh, no, you didn't. I didn't mention Laura Logan. Folks, Laura Logan was like the star of CBS, 60 Minutes. And she is speaking truth in a way that has gotten her canceled by Fox News, which went mainstream. I guess they went to the dark side. I don't know. But we're going to talk to her about that tomorrow in-depth.

Now, if Mel Gibson, Andrew Claven, Laura Logan, and Charlie Duke is not enough, I want two more pieces of crazy information. We have the winners for the three grand prize winners. We will announce those on the show tomorrow. Yes. Those of you who are getting copies of all of my books and Albin's books and everything, okay? But the biggest news, last night, I watched. film. I got an advanced screener, a rough cut

of Dinesh DeSuzza's film. It is called 2,000 mules. Everyone in America has to see this film. I mean, it is

incontrovertible proof that the election was stolen by the Biden campaign. There's a level of corruption it is unbelievable. Folks, it is unbelievable. If it doesn't make you mad, you're kind of a sick person. Because the only healthy response when you see this film is to say, we've got to stop this. This is wrong. This president was not elected by the American people. It's about as big a scandal as you could possibly get next to a civil war or a revolution with King George III. I mean, it is absolutely in contrast.

And anyone who doesn't like it is just going to, they're just going to call names or say, they're going to say whatever they need to say to avoid looking at the information. Because when people, when judges and people are going to be confronted with this information, it's not going to be pretty. It's not going to be pretty, but it's necessary. It is absolutely shattering stuff. This is 2,000 mules. Dinesh D'Souza. I'm in the film because they do a roundtable discussion with. with me and Charlie Kirk, Sebastian Gork, Dennis Prager, Larry, Elder, and Dinesh himself.

But it is absolutely shattering. There is simply no doubt. I don't even want to hear it. If you watch the film, you will understand. There is no doubt they stole the election through ballot stuffing. This is not, doesn't even get into the machines. We're going to leave it at that. And by the way, here's my interview with Mel Gibson.

No kidding. Just did this. Are you ready? It's really him. Hey there, Eric Metaxus. Eric, how are you? I'm swell. How are you? I'm great.

I'm not making you nervous, am I? Because that happens. No, why would it? Why? You're not making me nervous. I want you to relax. I'm very relaxed. Yeah.

You're not too relaxed, though. No, but I'm thinking of sending you money because someone to say, pay me taxes. Oh, come on. You've heard that one a million times, right? Never. Actually, that's quite original. Quite a really? I don't know, man.

I've got some basic questions for you, and then I'm going to let you go. Okay. And get on with your career. All right. I have really loved you for a long time. Not only because, but mainly because you have been in the Hollywood world, and you have taken your faith seriously, and you have used your platform in the business, to talk about the things that most people want to talk about,

which is to say God and God-related issues. So my question for you is, brother, when did that begin for you, that desire to do that in Hollywood? I'd say, you know, it became more apparent to me, probably somewhere in my late 30s. And, you know, it just... But why? In other words, is that because, you know, you have kids

and you're beginning to think like, hey, I'm, I'm pretty successful. Maybe I need to give back. I mean, so in other words, this thing. Sure. You wander through a wasteland for like 20 years, right? And you kind of start scratching your head thinking, eh, things aren't going so well. Maybe I should do things a little different.

And you begin to reexamine things that once you held firm and like maybe you relax with, you know, you let it go. And so it's just a gradual process of, I think working on yourself, trying to improve yourself. You know, because, you know, we're all, we all tend to sort of be egotistical. You know, it's all about me, you know, and it's pathetic, you know. I've never had that problem. You never had that?

No. Well, you deserve to. I'm the homeless guy you'll ever meet, Mel. Is that right? I just, I'm not afraid to tell you. Okay. Well, those of us who've watched, who've watched your career and your willingness to put it out there, I mean, the passion, the hell that you took when you were trying to bring that to the screen,

as you know, there were millions of people cheering for you and what you were doing. And we're cheering for you right now with the Father Stu film. We're just, we're proud of you. You're a voice for a lot of people. So let me ask you with regard to this film, how did you get involved in this film? How did this come to you? Yeah, this came through a screenplay. Well, Mark was involved and Rosie was involved.

And I looked at the screenplay that she had written and I was really charmed by it. I thought it was funny. And it was it was poignant. And it wasn't too sanitized or sacchar. And it wasn't preaching of the choir. It was a story about real people who were pretty, you know, venal in many respects, as we all are. And it showed you a path that this man took, a true path. and where he got to and where he ended.

And it was, it's kind of a triumphant kind of, you know, pretty inspiring story. And I liked it. I dug it, you know. It's absolutely, you know, it's beautiful, again, that you are using a platform. You have to get these stories out there. There is a hunger for it. But do you remember, at least I do.

I remember when you were trying to raise money, you, Mel Gibson are trying to raise money to put the passion on the screen. Right. And I was fascinating. how difficult that was for you. It's astonishing to me how hostile Hollywood and even not just Hollywood, but people are afraid,

but you pushed through, I would say. Well, I had trouble distributing the film, but I found a distribution company that would do it. And off we went. I financed it myself, of course, so it was not something that was done by a big studio or any. The seven sisters didn't.

dig it. But, but, you know, eventually, you don't want it came out. I mean, it was distributed overseas by Fox. And, and of course, domestically by a company, oh, man, what was their name? What was the name of that company? Can you imagine? Can't remember, man. It's gone now that company, but yeah. It's got, well, listen, speaking for a lot of people, we really love you. We're proud of what you've been doing, and we really look forward to the launch of this film. Yeah, well, thank you. And, you know, enjoy it. It's actually kind of funny.

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That's Inspireinsight.com. Go there. You heard me gush and gush about Andrew Claven in the previous segment. Since Andrew Claven is now listening to me talk, I'm not going to gush that much. But what the heck, life is too short. His book is called The Truth and Beauty, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to deeper understanding of the words of Jesus. What? Exactly. The book is gorgeous, and I never do this. I don't have time to read books, you know? I don't know what it is that I'm doing, but I don't

have time to read books. Yesterday, I took the time to read the whole book, the entire book, yesterday. And you know what? It's not that good. I can only say that if it's brilliant. It is absolutely, it's not less than brilliant, not less than brilliant, at least brilliant. And I'm really honored that I get to talk to Andrew Claven. Andrew, welcome to the program. Thanks. It's always great to see, Eric. Well, listen, you're complicated, and I guess probably most brilliant

people are kind of weird and complicated. You've been nominated for the Edgar Award, the Mystery Writer of America for the Edgar Award, five times you've won it twice. So you have one of these weird brains, which I'm in awe of where you

can write mysteries. I'm in of that. And you've done that. You've made a living doing that. A number of best-selling novels. One of your novels was turned into a film starring Michael Douglas and filmed by Clint Eastwood. You just, you do all kinds of stuff. But one thing that you do, we can just start here, you write. You write. We've already said that. But the book that you've written here, The Truth and the Beauty, when I read the title of and the subtitle I thought, what? This is, I can't, I'm drooling almost actually to read this book because, you know, I was an English major.

I love English literature. And yesterday I did what I never do. I read the whole book start to finish and was just champing at the bit like crazy to talk to you today. So I will now stop talking and ask you, sir, what in the world got you to write this? I mean, it's an oblique. strange way into the subject.

How did you find your way to the subject of this book? Yeah, I dreaded pitching this book to my agent because I wrote it first and then I had to find somebody who'd handle it and then somebody who would buy it. And it came on me by surprise. I was having a conversation with my son, Spencer,

who was a brilliant guy, an Oxford classics, PhD and all this. And I was talking to him about how strange a lot of the Gospels are, especially the words of Jesus and self. They're hard to understand. And I said to them, every time I do understand them, I become more joyful in my life. But a lot of them just kind of strike me as odd. I mean, just basic things that we quote all the time, like, love your enemies. Like, I don't even like my enemies.

You know, the thing is, but it takes a certain level, I would argue, of intellectual self-confidence to say what you just said. In other words, as you say many times in the book, a lot of pastors maybe they kind of talk around this or they give you the kind of the boilerplate answer. But if you're honest about it, because I think you have to have a faith that's deep enough to be willing to ask these hard questions to say, I'm not scared of the questions. My faith is not going to evaporate because I find something difficult. And that's kind of what you do in the book. Like you look at something and you say what most people are thinking but afraid to think out loud.

What is this? This is a weird story. What in the world is? is Jesus getting at with this? And you ask those questions. But I still am fascinated that you, that you go into everyone and try to kind of puzzle it out. Andrew, before we really get into the meat of this book,

there are most people listening don't know your story. So would you just talk briefly about what you and I've talked about on this program a number of years ago when your book came out, talking about how you came to faith? because you were raised as a secular Jew. Tell a little bit of that story so people have a sense of who you are. Well, this is why I question things because it took me so long to come from faith, and I came from afar.

So I went down every wrong road possible. I don't doubt a lot. I'm pretty sure that I got it right after 35 years of thinking about it so closely. So that's why I can ask the questions that maybe you can't ask if you were born into it. Like you said, I was raised a Jew, but I was never really taught about God. I was taught about the traditions and the, you know, the ceremonies and all that and a certain kind of racial pride. But that made it empty for me. And so I ultimately was estranged from it.

But at the same time, I always wanted to be a writer and I wanted to study literature. And as I studied literature, I came to believe what the great poet William Blake said, that the Bible is the great code of art. And that the Bible, especially the Gospels, is at the center of everything I loved. All the beauty that I loved, all the truth that I believed in was centered around the Gospels. I couldn't accept it because I was just too far away from that. The life I lived was not that life. The upbringing I had was not that upbringing. And I went through terrible pain, emotional and mental pain when I was in my late 20s.

I really had a terrible breakdown. I'm one of the only people I've ever met who went sane from that level of craziness. Now, when you say that, because you did write about it in the previous book, what's the name of the previous book where you deal with this? The Great Good Thing. The Great Good Thing. Okay. In that book, yeah, you talk about having a total breakdown.

I mean, what does that look like? How is that described clinically? What do they say happen to you? What do you say happen to you? Well, I started to have terrible bouts of hypochondria that wouldn't go away, constant, constant worry, constant rage, a completely diluted sense of the world in which I would have these kind of periods of weird mysticism, not true spirituality, but just kind of weird mystic revelations. You know, when you're crazy, you're always finding the truth.

You can tell when you talk to crazy people, they're always saying, I just figured, I finally figured this out. Now I see it all. That was happening to me continually. I was just totally broken down. I could not work, really. I couldn't make a living. And it was what happened to me was a miracle.

I'm convinced of it. It was a miracle of love between me and this brilliant psychiatrist who mentored me back to health. and the degree of health I came back to, the joy, the happiness that I kind of found after a few years of therapy was so intense that I began to think, well, okay, all these delusions that during all the time I was in so much pain and had all these delusions, I couldn't believe in God because I was convinced it would just be a crutch. I convinced it would just be me grabbing a piece of driftwood that was floating by to keep from drowning. But now I'm feeling good, and all the logic of those beliefs still holds. I still believe you cannot have a moral world without a God and that we are in a world with a moral order. And so I began to pray, I mean, almost offhandedly.

And it changed my life. Five years of prayer, not to the Christian God, not to any particular God, just a God that I came to know over these five years. And it was such a transformation that after five years, I basically said to God, well, you know, you're God and I'm just a schmo, but you've done all this stuff for me. what can I do for you? You know, what am I supposed to, how am I supposed to respond? And I almost, it wasn't a voice in my head, but it was just an absolute certainty that I should be baptized. And I remember in the moment that it came to me, the words that came out loud out of my mouth where you've got to be kidding me. You know, why would I do that? That would just, you know, it's going to ruin my life in so many different ways. But when I went back to the Bible,

which I'd been reading all that time as literature, and reread it again as the reportage, as the facts. And I thought, oh, yeah, now I get it. Now it suddenly makes sense. Now I'm not picking away at it like a suit. I'm not trying to pull it apart. Now I just see the whole of it. And, you know, at that point, I had to become a Christian out of pure integrity. And again, the moment I was baptized, a kind of cowl of peace dropped over me. I mean, it was like maybe two weeks later, three weeks later, my wife, who knows me better

than anyone, turned to me. And she said, you are like an entirely different person. Serenity has come over you and this joy. And it has maintained, it has stayed that way. And that's why it's so important to me to understand. Because when I understand, when something bothers me and it's not making sense and what I hear what the preachers say. And I think, no, that's not quite it. And when the preachers, I always used to come home from church and my wife would say, what did the preacher say?

I would say, be nice. You know, I don't think the king of the universe needed to suffer death and burial to tell me to be nice. I'm relatively nice. Right. So I wanted to get into it deeper. And when they say be nice, what they're implying is the king. of the universe dying a crucifixion, torture death at the hands of the Romans, that's all really a metaphor. Let's not worry too much about that. And let's just be nice. So true. And try not to be

divisive. So it's interesting, though, that your mind, I think it's when people go through hell, which you did, it forces you to cut out the nonsense and to say, I'm just going to, I'm not afraid to see things as they are, to question things. So in a way, suffering frees us to some extent, to be authentic. And that's ultimately what this book is about. I want to, before we go to the break, I want to remind my audience that the real subject of conversation is this book, The Truth and Beauty, Andrew Claven, Clavin with a K, how the lives and works of England's greatest poets point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus.

Your biography, the great good thing, it's an amazing book, and I want to talk to you about that again at some point, just because there's so much there. But this is the new book, and congratulations to Zondervan for taking a chance on a book like this. Actually, how pathetic we have to say that. This is a great book, period, folks. Andrew Claven, The Truth and Beauty.

We'll be right back. In case you haven't been paying attention, the Biden administration has caused a financial crisis and they have no clue how to fix it. Oil prices have skyrocketed. And when oil prices go up, the cost of transportation and shipping spikes, leading the prices of goods to rise. And when we're already seeing record inflation, that's the last thing we need. Our economy is in trouble and you need to take steps to protect yourself. If all your money is tied up in stocks, bonds, and traditional markets, you are vulnerable. Gold is one of the best ways to protect your retirement. No matter what happens, you own your gold. It is real, it is physical, it's always been valuable since the dawn of time.

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point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus. Now, Andrew, like I'm a, you know, 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 say, I want to embarrass you further and say that, you know, you're a great writer.

Your writing is great. The ideas are amazing, but the writing itself. When I, right in the beginning you use the word cacolorum. 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 the... 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 emotion, 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, a level of chaos on the continent, just hard for us to imagine what that would have been like. But that's what you talk about. Right. And just like we had a kind of cultural revolution in the 60s where everybody thought it was going to be the age of Aquarius, they thought the French Revolution was going to bring paradise. And instead it devolved into obviously the terror and then a world war. The Napoleonic Wars went all over Europe and Egypt and they were all over the place for 12 years. And people, just in the way that people could not accept that the Soviet Union's collapse meant that socialism and communism didn't work. radicals on the continent could not admit that the French Revolution had failed, and anybody who said it failed, like the great poet William Wordsworth, was canceled, literally canceled. They came after you in every journal they could. They wrote famous poems about Wordsworth, about what a bad guy he was because he became a conservative after the revolution failed. People started questioning gender roles, whether marriage was a good thing, not just whether marriage was a good thing, but whether women should be able to sleep around at the same level that men had been doing.

they began to question God. That to me is the center of it, that they lost, they were losing faith in God, intellectuals. Just like now, it became a default setting for intellectuals to question, certainly organized religion, and possibly God. And so what these poets were taxed with, they were taxed with inventing a new world, a new form of consciousness, a new way of seeing things, and many of them. And this has been written about by far greater critics than me, one critic named M.H. Abrams wrote a wonderful book about it. many of them started to reinvent Christianity as an internal religion. Instead of talking about man's relationship to God, they started talking about man's relationship to himself and his relationship to nature.

And C.S. Lewis, the great Christian apologist, read Wordsworth and he said, yes, if you follow this train of thought, you will be converted. You know, it's not the end, it's the beginning, but you follow that road and you will be converted. And that's what happened to Wordsworth. Wordsworth was converted. And at the heart of all of them, I think, he sort of becomes the anti-hero, the hero of the book, but he was such a mess of Samuel Coleridge, who was the most brilliant man of his generation, one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. He almost knew everything. He was the one guy that knew that Jesus Christ was at the center of their search. And he went from writer to writer to writer, talked incessantly and changed all of them. And sometimes, you know, he brought them just a new way of seeing things. So what happened to me is when I went back to the Gospels to try and understand them. I realized these guys had built a road back to the Gospels

from a place very much like the place where we live. And I started to think, well, if you follow that road, maybe you come back to the Gospels and see them in a new way. And that's what happened to me, that I started to read the words of Jesus a genuinely new way. And it's not that it changes the old things that you know. It's simply more. It simply expands it because the thing that I don't think Jesus was saying was be nice or you'll be punished. And And if you're nice, he'll get a big reward. That's not what I think he was actually saying. I don't think we needed the king of our universe to do what he did to give us that piece of

information. He was telling you a way, just he was giving you a way of seeing things. You know, there's all these lines in the Gospels that you forget about, like where he says, I want the joy that's in me to be in you. You stop and think about that for a minute and think like, do the Christians I know have the joy that is in Jesus in them? And joy, I don't use the word joy to mean happiness. You know, it's not like you're supposed to walk around with a big grin on your face when things are falling apart.

It's what the poet's called gusto. You're supposed to live as if it matters, as if every minute you're alive is important and exciting and interesting, even when it is incredibly painful and full of suffering. And the poets actually teach that. And when you read what they say and you go back to Jesus, you realize he's taking it to even the next level. There is so much in this book. As I say, I read the whole book yesterday, so it can't be that long. No.

But it is just loaded with, I mean, we're going to go to a break, but just your bringing to life characters with whom I had the most glancing familiarity, like Samuel Taylor, Coleridge, and Keats, and just to see them as human beings. And that alone is a high recommendation to read the book. We'll be right back talking to Andrew Claven. The book is The Truth. and beauty. Hey, folks, if you listen to this program, of course, you've heard me talk at infinitum about my pillow and my friend Mike Lindell. Well, Mike has just announced that you will receive

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978. 3057. He used the promo code. Eric. Folks, welcome back. I'm talking to Andrew Claven. Do you understand I'm talking to Andrew Claven? He's written a book called The Truth and Beauty. It's an amazing book. It is at least brilliant, at least brilliant. And it was just wonderful to read. Andrew, I want to say, congratulations on really having the guts to write this book, because I can see, how a lot of editors or publishers would try to steer you in different directions. And you obviously said to them, shut up. Here's the book. And I'm so glad you, I'm so glad you did. There's only one editor that I could have think of when I finished it. And I put, as you know, I put a lot of work into it.

I thought, gee, if this one editor turns this down, I simply don't know where else I'll go. So Webster Younce, he's now the publisher of Zondervand, but he was my editor on my memoir. took it instantly. I'm shocking. I'm not surprised. I mean, that he would be the one that I would suggest,

and God bless him for doing that. Because this is an important book, and I think that you're, as I said, the level of writing, what you get into, what really delighted me

was, I mentioned this earlier, how you bring to life figures that I didn't really think of biographically. I mean, somebody mentions Coleridge. Okay, I've heard of the rhyme of the ancient Mariner. You know, you mentioned Keith,

you mentioned it. These are, these are figures that I had not really come to appreciate as human beings, just as these names behind poems. I'm really glad you bring this up because the whole thing was, I know that people don't read poetry. Poetry is dead. The art of poetry is for people like me who study English literature

and who love English literature, but most people don't read it. And I didn't want you to have to know poetry or even like it to get into what I was saying. And these people lived some of the most interesting lives in literary history. history. They were, I mean, there were six, there were six of the greatest poets who have ever lived, living on the island, the British island at the same time. They were geniuses. They were drug addicts. They were, you know, scoundrels. They were brilliant. They fought with each other. They yelled at each other. I mean, this book starts with a wild, drunken party they were all at. It's in. Their whole books have been written about this party. So I just wanted to get you into their minds so that you could see that what they were doing, this challenge of rebuilding. the consciousness of human beings for the modern age was a dramatic human challenge taken on by dramatic humans. And it's the thing about intellectual life when it's lived at that level is it's just as exciting as being an explorer or being a soldier or any of the things that we tell stories about. Except I would say this is more dangerous. I mean, when I look at some lives

that are destroyed, when you think of Byron, Mary Shelley, it's an interesting thing because we have seen it at a time. You parallel this era of the romantics, you know, from a little bit over 200 years ago with the modern era and the 60s. And we all see lives that have been destroyed, the abortions, the broken hearts, the just the drug deaths, right? It's very similar what you're writing about. I mean, when you talk about, you know, Byron's sister and all of this incredible, I mean, it's kind of funny because it is Byronesque. It is, you know, the romantic poet, the Byronic hero living for himself. It's kind of like a Nietzschean Ubermensch before Nietzsche, right? Just breaking all the rules and destroying humans in his wake, just leaving humans in his wake. But there's so many of

these characters. And then some of them are really good, good people. I mean, when you look at Wordsworth, Keats, I mean, it's just, you know, I wish somebody would do a mini-series. a streaming series for Amazon Prime or something, because these are amazing stories. And I know a number of these stories have been told here and there, but let's just talk about Coleridge, for example. I really knew nothing about Coleridge.

And you, I mean, is there anybody funnier, more entertaining, more crazy, amazing, beautiful than Samuel Coleridge? We should all know who he is, and you bring him to life. Yeah, and there are long paragraphs written about how much he talked. Just people were absolutely stunned

by the wave of conversation that came off of them. And every single one of them was changed. And when he met Wordsworth, when he first really got friendly with Wordsworth, Wordsworth was lost. You know, he was kind of a... Coleridge called him a semi-athist. He didn't know how to deal with the failure

of the French Revolution. He had been a radical, and now all his radical dreams were gone. He didn't have any money. He didn't know where he was going. After a year of listening to Coleridge, pound him with talk, he became the greatest poet of his job.

generation. And it was clearly from a collaboration with Coleridge that he had this vision of the human mind as being in collaboration essentially with God, as he called it with the one great mind and that your life is a creation, is part of creation. Your life is continued creation. That was Coleridge's idea that became Wordsworth's idea. When he met Keats, Keats, was on the verge of death. Keats died a very, very young man, one of the most tragic stories in the book. And Keats was frozen. He was lost. And he had an hour, two hour, with Coleridge walking in the park, came back and in a couple of months wrote five or six of the greatest poems ever written, really the greatest poetry since Shakespeare. And everything that Coleridge touched is a broken man, this drug addict, this hysteric, this guy whose marriage was miserable.

Everything he touched became magic, just lit up. And even Mary Shelley, I have a chapter on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. She was a little girl, and Coleridge came over her house and recited the rhyme of the ancient mariner. and if you look at Frankenstein, the novel, Frankenstein's filled with Coleridge. I mean, Coleridge is all through it. So he just changed everybody. It's pretty dramatic. I mean, and this is what I'm saying is that this is a story that I was unfamiliar with, you know.

And I was an English major at Yale, and, you know, they didn't teach this stuff. They were, like, already into Foucault and the deri da and why don't you go blow your brains out before you read the next poem? You know, that level of depth of literary criticism. And I have to say that when you get into this and you understand. understand how it happened, there's something really beautiful about it. I mean, you talk about its lyrical ballads. Is that the name of the book that Coleridge wrote with Wordsworth? Talk about that. We just got 60 seconds, but talk about that book. It was an absolute revolutionary book that changed the course of English poetry and really invented a new way of looking at the world for a new

generation. I mean, really, people, there were stories about people who had been massively depressed and then read this book and sort of came back and started to understand the world better. And it really was this collaboration of Coleridge, this deep believer in Christianity, but at a very intellectual level. And Wordsworth, this guy searching for meaning. And what he did was he turned Wordsworth into a poet who could see in the smallest, most broken person

could see something beautiful. And that's what Wordsworth writes about in it, where Coleridge writes about kind of supernatural ideas that lead us back to God. We're going to go to another break. I apologize for the breaks, but this is principally radio. We'll be right back talking to Andrew Claven. The book, which is out today, and which I recommend very highly,

is called The Truth and Beauty. Don't go away. Folks, I can continue my conversation with Andrew Claven, K-L-A-V-A-N. The book out today, it's called The Truth and Beauty, How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets, point the way to a deeper understanding of the words of Jesus. And Andrew, part of the fun of this book is being reminded because you tell these lovely stories, these powerful, beautiful, funny stories of all these characters and how they interacted with each other.

Because, you know, we think of them as, you know, names in the Pantheon, you know. But the idea that they're, you know, that Milton, for example, John Milton, who precedes all of these figures, but that he was a human being and that he was this kind of a person and not that kind of a person. And how his work led to some of them. I guess it was Wordsworth, right, who was obsessed with Milton. Yeah, he wanted to rewrite basically Paradise Lost the story of the Fall of Man. Milton's brilliant poem on The Fall of Man. He kind of wanted to rewrite it as a mental event.

And he never quite got around to it. He never quite did it. But he was obsessed with becoming the new novel. Aren't you glad he didn't? It's kind of funny. There's the one piece of bad advice Colerge gave him. He told him he should be writing longer poems, but it was really words were shorter poems that are great. Well, it's so funny.

But just the way they all interacted with each other, we forget really that that was the case. At least most of us forget that kind of thing. But you bring them to life. You also talk about Keats. I mean, my goodness, he died at age 25. And according to you, and I want to ask you about this, you say, that you think he was the greatest poetic genius since Shakespeare. Now, there are a lot of poetic geniuses out there.

What makes you have that, I guess, judgment about Keats? Because, of course, he wrote so little ultimately because he died so young. But what was it about Keats that makes you kind of put him up there at the top of the Pantheon? It was really the, you know, it's really the truth and duty. His poetry is so beautiful to read and so dense, so packed with meaning the way Shakespeare's is that you could hesitate between two words without ever getting to the end of the way they reverberate off each other. The title of the book comes from him from his ode on a Grecian urn in which he's basically contemplating how art leads us into eternity. And the Grecian urn says at the end of the poem to humankind, it says, beauty is truth. truth, beauty, that's all you know on earth and all you need to know.

And that line, just like the lines of the gospel, always puzzled me. But as you read Keats' letters and you read more about what he was thinking, you realize that the kind of beauty he's talking about is not prettiness. It's not kind of something that you might have one thing that you like and I have something else that I like. It's this great shock of understanding that what you are seeing in front of you somehow resonates with a greater truth than what you're actually. seeing with your eyes. And that moment, it kind of tells you that you are a God-made machine for

finding the truth. And the reason that matters is we're living in a world right now where your inner life, your inner experience is either dismissed as subjective and therefore untrue, or it's elevated to the point of reality so that I can say, oh, guess what, Eric, I just turned into a woman, and now you have to call me a woman because my inner life is sovereign. And what all three poets, Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Keats were saying is, no, you're in. a collaboration with reality. Your inner life is a new creation out of the reality that you have. And if it's not in keeping with the reality that is out there with God's creation,

then it's not beautiful and it's not true. But when it is, you get this shock of beauty that is what poetry gives you and what real awake life gives you as well. It's a funny thing, reality, isn't it? It really, it's just, you know, if you're, if you don't like reality, you're going to have problems. You're going to be kicking against the goads. And all right, when we come back, I know we don't have a ton of time with you, but I want to get to the end of the book where you bring Jesus and the Gospels into it. Really absolutely fascinating and important. We'll be right

back talking to Andrew Claven, the book, brand new book, The Truth and Beauty.