Friday, February 20, 2015

 

A Little-Known Latin Treatise

T.S. Eliot, letter to Bonamy Dobrée (April 17, 1931), in The Letters of T.S. Eliot, edd. Valerie Eliot and John Haffenden, Vol. 5: 1930-1931 (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), pp. 550-551:
The next talk is more difficult; it is easier to applaud Dryden in general than to make out a popular case for his Tragedy — but my method is to proceed from the simple to the complex, which was the method laid down by Johannes Procopius in his great work De Flatu, which begins 'All farts are in three dimensions' before proceeding to his elaborate theory of the time-space reality in flatulence, anticipating modern physics.
Hat tip: Ian Jackson.

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