Death, fame, art, and religion become comic subjects in Twenty First Century Blues, Twenty First Century Blues, the fourth collection from Richard Cecil. Whether elegizing his predecessors, predicting his own end, channeling Dickinson’s “corpse-eye-view of stony death,” or imagining Yeats living in Indiana and dealing with English department politics, Cecil tempers his morbidity with a straightforward, tender brand of humor and a refreshing honesty about the shelf life of contemporary poetry. Deadpan and dark, yet pulsing with the spirit of life, these poems speak of historic France, Italy, and Switzerland, where religious persecutions, ancient catastrophes, and other, less personal, failures overshadow the disappointments and shortcomings of the poet’s modern life in the Midwest. Grimly cheered by these revelations, Cecil shows that poets, like cicadas screaming in the summer air, “won’t shut up until we’re skeletons.”
Richard Cecil was a leading Evangelical Anglican clergyman of the 18th and 19th centuries. His father was an Anglican while his mother was a Dissenter, whose family had been devout Christians for generations.
He later became minister of two small livings in Lewes, Sussex. After the death of his parents, he moved, because of bad health, to Islington, London and preached at different churches and chapels there. For some years he preached a lecture at Lothbury at 6 o'clock on a Sabbath morning, and later an evening lecture in Orange Street, followed by the chapel in Long Acre. From 1787 he preached the evening lecture at Christ Church, Spitalfields.
In 1788 he became minister of St John's Chapel, Bedford Row, which became a major Evangelical Anglican venue continuing into the mid 19th century.
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