Sixty-four contestants (the large number in any March Madness single elimination tournament) can be quite overwhelming.
As quickly as we can, let’s play the tournament and decrease the store.
We’ve looked at all the Sublime March Madness teams—their names and what they bring to the table.
So we are all judged, whether we are a person with no special abilities, or a sports team with dozens of athletes and assistant coaches and billion dollar owners and equipment managers.
In the first game of the tournament, in the Classical bracket, Homer prevailed against Edmund Burke, and the template was established: emotional poetry v. criticism skeptical of the emotions. Emotion, or excitement, won. Homer has advanced to the second round.
In the second contest in the Classical bracket, we have Plato himself, representing the “criticism skeptical of emotions” side of the template, with his famous advice to climb from particular beauty to beauty itself, facing off against the humble and melancholy poet, born in the early 18th century, an early Romantic poet, transitioning from the Augustan, Thomas Gray.
Gray is one more example that Romanticism began much earlier than Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, and Shelley—for Romanticism, if the secret be told, is an expression of Plato, if we are not mistaken. Shakespeare’s plays are each like Platonic dialogues, a lesson for sobering us up, for fighting vanity and illusion. Shakespeare does not favor poetry and the emotions, though his plays are full of songs and feelings—Keats loved Shakespeare, the early Romantic.
Romanticism, the melancholy dream, was influenced by Plato through Milton’s “Il Penseroso.” —“Hence vain deluding joys.”
But Milton’s melancholy poem had a mirthful companion piece, “L’Allegro.”
Plato asked that we first fix on earthly beauty before we ascend towards the beauty of thought and morality, and then beauty itself.
The poets who are devotees of Plato—whether they know it, or not—can be said to be all the sweet and melancholy Romantic poets—and here’s why.
To move from an appreciation of someone who is beautiful to an appreciation of all beauty involves the following:
1. The kind of mind which can entertain different types of beauty as a way of becoming adept and flexible in moving upwards on the Platonic Ladder to True Beauty—demonstrated by the poet who can succeed in writing similar poems which partake of melancholy, on one hand, and mirth, on the other. To appreciate equal opposites helps one to transcend.
2. Melancholy, because it is sad to say goodbye to the one we love as we venture upwards towards Love itself.
This is why the Romantic poets, who serve Plato, tend to be melancholic. Byron was both mirthful and sad—which is fine, too.
This excerpt from Gray’s meditative “Elegy,” sounds like Keats (50 years before Keats was born):
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
This is poetry that wishes to remain amid the beauty of the earth just a little longer, before it begins the bright journey Plato requires.
Gray’ sample is so beautiful it is almost as if the journey were done.
Gray wins!
A stunning upset!
Plato, the Greek philosopher, like a ghost, vanishes.