Andrew Klavan’s The Truth and Beauty dissects Romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley—as modern parallels to today’s cultural wars, stripping away relativism to reclaim Jesus’ literal words. He frames the French Revolution’s failures and radical feminism as echoes of today’s "cancel culture," defending conservative values amid progressive attacks on art and faith. The book argues truth, beauty, and goodness are inseparable, critiquing modern media’s moral decay while urging readers to engage with uplifting literature—just as he found Jesus through poetry. Klavan’s controversial take on gender roles, atheism, and censorship challenges today’s relativism, using Keats’ "Beauty is truth" as a rallying cry for divine alignment over subjective chaos. [Automatically generated summary]
And when I read books about Jesus, usually they involve the Gospels, of course, the parables, maybe the apostles play a role, maybe the doctors and fathers of the church and the later saints.
Very rarely do they involve a bunch of rap scallion crazy Englishmen from just a couple of centuries ago.
But that is exactly what we get in The Truth and Beauty by my friend Andrew Clavin, a truly beautiful book.
Drew, thank you for coming on.
It's a pleasure and thank you for the wonderful blurb you put on the back.
I will say that not only is all the writing in the book eloquent, but I think that writing on the back of the book is very eloquent too.
The book is phenomenal.
I say this is not flattery, not just because we're friends.
It's just terrific.
I just love the book.
Well, thank you.
And I'll take you seriously since I can't do anything for you.
This is a really weird book.
I'm just going to put it out there.
It's a book about you.
It's part memoir.
It's part theological meditation.
And it's part literary criticism of the Romantic English poets.
Drew, explain yourself.
Well, it tells the story in the introduction.
You know, I was talking to your friend, my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation.
And, you know, we had this conversation about how weird the gospels are.
I mean, one of the things, a lot of Christianity is about shutting Jesus up.
It's about talking about what he did and who he was and what it means for you and your, but it's not about listening to what he actually said.
And when you actually listen to what he said, a lot of it's very weird.
You know, I mean, the one that always comes back to me is like Peter walking on water and he becomes afraid and he begins to sink and Jesus says, oh ye have little faith.
Like, well, wait a minute.
How many steps on water have you taken?
You know, me, none, you know.
So I just, I was talking to Spencer about this and how hard it was for me to understand what he's actually saying.
Once you get rid of all the kind of accrued tradition and the kind of knee-jerk ideas, oh, this is what he meant.
This is what he meant.
And Spencer said to me, you know, you're trying to understand a philosophy instead of trying to get to know a man.
And I thought, gee, that's an actual brilliant comment.
And so I went back to the Gospel.
I taught myself how to read Koine Greek, the earliest language we have the Gospels in.
And I just thought, I'm just going to read this almost like a novel or like a biography where a guy is saying stuff, and I'm not going to listen to St. Paul.
I'm not going to listen to the Pope.
I'm not going to listen to the Protestant churches.
I'm just going to listen to what this guy says in an effort to find out who he is, what he's thinking.
And as I'm reading this, I thought, oh, yeah, this is kind of like the Romantic poets.
I mean, who are my favorite poets?
But I was thinking, yeah, this is kind of what they were talking about.
And so I started to go back to those to sort of fill in the gap.
And what I realized was, you know, the Romantic period was very much like our period.
It was a kind of period where belief was slipping, God was going out of the world, radical politics, radical feminism, people questioning gender roles and questioning marriage.
All the stuff that's going on today was going on then.
And these poets, especially the conservative ones, the Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were hated.
They were canceled for being conservative.
They were the ones who started to say, well, how do we get back to a place where the human soul matters, where the human interior matters?
And they wrote the most beautiful poetry since William Shakespeare.
I mean, unbelievably beautiful poetry that informs, changes the way you think about what Jesus is saying.
It gets rid of this, oh, who am I condemning this week?
And you're a bad Christian, I'm a good Christian, or this one's doing that.
It's all about how you see the world, how you look at the world.
And what Jesus is trying to tell you is how to see the world the way he sees it, which is the way God sees it.
And once you start doing that, it's this insanely joyful experience.
And that's kind of what I was just trying to communicate, the insane joy of seeing the world the way Jesus wants you to see it.
Because you might think that a book called The Truth and Beauty, you might think it is a pretentious book.
You might think it is a sort of sappy, sentimental book.
And what's so striking about it, both in the prose, which is excellent, and in the ideas, is that it's the least pretentious book you're ever going to read.
And it's the least sentimental book you're ever going to read because you'll have either beautiful poetry on one page or some beautiful line of Christ.
And then you'll say, what does this mean?
I don't know what this means.
I know I should pretend like I know what it means, but I just don't know.
And you really try to get into the nitty and gritty of that.
And you're dealing with these people.
I mean, so much of the book is stories about these people living in a time just like ours, but trying to understand it in a new way, in a fresh way.
And they were, you know, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a drug addict.
You know, Keats died when he was 25.
So he's this incredibly tragic, almost, you know, almost literarily tragic, like he's in a tragedy figure.
You have Charles Lamb, whose sister murdered their mother and who they lived in tandem their whole life.
And every kind of couple of months, he'd have to take her off to the insane asylum.
I mean, these guys were really a wild bunch, and they were all in this little piece, this little island at the same time.
The six greatest poets, really, who have ever lived, with the exception maybe of John Milton and Shakespeare, all living at the same time.
And it was just electric.
It was, you know, you had a party and people would get drunk and they'd be, but they'd be the most brilliant people on earth getting drunk.
And so I just try to tell those stories and show you where the thought came out of it.
And the whole point of it, though, is really about, it's really about you.
Art For Transformation00:13:55
It's about like the person who sits down with the gospels and thinks, you know, why am I not getting this?
Why do I actually not think that I should love my enemy?
Why do I think, you know, when somebody slaps me, I don't turn the other cheek.
I really beat the crap out of them.
You know, we all feel like that.
And we all feel like somehow it's moral to say those things, but it's not moral to do them.
And that's the thing that I got stuck on.
I thought, I don't do that.
I say what I mean, and I believe what I believe, and I don't believe what I don't believe.
And I don't want to go around saying, turn the other cheek if what I really mean is, you know, punch the guy in the gut.
Yeah.
So I wanted to understand, seeing that, you know, Jesus was the son of God and all, I thought probably he meant what he said and he actually was trying to convey something.
And these poets, for me, unlocked it.
And I think they will for a lot of people.
I don't think this is not a book of literary criticism.
It's not parsing poems this way and that.
It's just trying to get at real truths that matter in your life.
So you say that the time period in which the Romantics lived was similar in many ways to our own.
So how is it similar?
Well, you know, we had, in my lifetime, before yours, but we had this revolution in this country, the 60s, when suddenly people were saying this is the age of Aquarius and everything is going to be perfect after this and we're going to live in a new paradise of peacefulness.
There's not going to be any war.
And they had the same thing.
They had the French Revolution, which is it's hard to communicate the bliss this sent through thinking people in the 18th century.
They had this wonderful revolution.
They thought now all these kings are going to be gone, all these priests telling us who we can, can't sleep with, they're going to be gone.
This marriage stuff which gets you so frustrated and angry, that's going to be gone.
All of it is, we're going to have a brand new world and it's going to be paradise.
And of course, within years, it devolved not only into the terror and people being slaughtered all over France, it became a world war with the Napoleonic Wars.
They were fighting all over the world.
And guys like Wordsworth started to say, well, that didn't work.
So what are we missing?
What's gone wrong?
In the same way, honest people here started to say when the Soviet Union collapsed, well, gee, we thought that was going to be the new paradise.
We thought everything was going to be equal, everything was going to be peaceful, and now we're living in this world of wars all over the world.
Honest people, i.e. conservative people, started to say, well, that didn't work.
What now?
And so just like then when Wordsworth said this French Revolution didn't work, we have to go back to some of our traditions to find out how to go forward.
He was excoriated.
I mean, he was just, you talk about cancel culture.
There are literally famous poems written about William Wordsworth and what a schmuck he was for not following the radical line.
And these poems are anthologized.
I mean, throughout history, Wordsworth is now attacked in famous anthologies of famous poems.
So the same kind of stuff, the same intensity of political thought was going on.
And one of the things I think that you and I know after following a lot of politics is you don't get the real answers of life from politics.
You know, at best, politics allows you to search for the answers of life, but it doesn't give you the answers of life.
And that is, I think, why these poets are so important, that they ultimately weren't political.
That's a really interesting point, because inasmuch as they had political views, they widely disagreed.
And the ones, I guess, who lived longer became conservatives, and the ones who died young remained fairly left-wing.
Yeah, I mean, they were guys, you know, so many of them died young, and it's hard to know, for instance, what Keats would have said.
But Shelley, a beautiful poet, wrote beautiful poetry, but he was a genuine radical.
He genuinely believed in free love.
He had this affair.
He left his wife, who then killed herself, ran off with Mary Shelley, who fills a chapter of the book because of the genius of her book, Frankenstein.
And he was a genuine radical.
After he died, he died very young, and Mary was devoted to him.
She kind of reinvented him as this angel of poetry.
But he was a guy who had been kicked out of college for his atheism and for attacking the crown and all this stuff.
And so you had people who had a wide view of life, from very conservative like Wordsworth to very radical like Shelley.
But they were all trying to solve one problem.
What happens when God goes out of the world?
Do you bring him back?
Do you let him go?
How do you go forward?
And I think that's the exact problem we're trying to solve today.
I think that the hostility toward God in the mainstream literature and the kind of default intellectual world is so intense that to sit and say, well, wait a minute, I actually think you're wrong.
What does that mean?
Is a dangerous act.
And I think that this book is part of that act.
And what does it mean in a world where we are told that it is objectively true that there is no such thing as objective truth?
I love the title.
You love the title.
This is probably why it is an unmarketable title.
And this is why Ben and Jeremy make fun of the title.
But I really like it because it gets to the heart of every single subject that you're talking about in the book.
But do you have a defense once and for all to really stick it to Ben and Jeremy of the truth and beauty?
Well, my defense to Ben was it is about Jesus and poetry.
It's literally about the truth and beauty.
And I just said that to annoy him, but it's also true.
And it comes from one of the greatest poems in all of history, John Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn, where he looks at a work of art and the work of art speaks to him.
And the work of art says to him, beauty is truth, and truth is beauty.
That's all you know in life and all you need to know.
And I think that that is, like many of the sayings of Jesus, that's a very mysterious thing.
Is truth beauty and is beauty truth?
And if so, what does it mean?
And I think this is what these poets were getting at.
They were getting at something really important and profound about your inner life, my inner life, the inner life of every single human being, whether he's smart or dumb, whether he's a college professor or just a guy working in the street, the inner life of human beings and how the truth lives there and where that truth comes from.
And so, yeah, I stand by my title and I am going to key Ben's car.
You know, I think the title actually matters for politics today, too, because the idea that truth is beauty and beauty, truth, did not originate with John Keats.
This is an ancient idea.
This refers to the transcendentals, the idea that the good, the true, and the beautiful are united, that they have something to do with one another.
And so sometimes people will ask my politics.
I say, well, I'm really interested in more good, less bad.
You know, more truth, less falsehood.
Yeah, yeah.
More beauty, less ugliness.
And that really is what I'm after.
I want a society that exalts the good, the true, and the beautiful and suppresses the false and the ugly and the evil and the things that are going to degrade you.
And this has kind of always been understood as a basic aspect of politics.
And yet, in recent decades, even the conservatives, forget the liberals for a second, even the conservatives, all they ever seem to talk about is spreadsheets and how we're going to decrease the marginal tax rate.
And that's somehow going to give us a flourishing society in and of itself.
I mean, what is the role of the truth and the beauty in politics?
And not only that, we've made it so that if you talk about the good, people say, well, your good may not be someone else's good.
If you talk about the true, they say, is there really, you know, they talk like Pontius Pilate, what is truth?
And if you talk about the beautiful, they say that's just a matter of taste.
All those things are untrue.
There actually is a truth.
There actually is an objective beauty.
And there actually is an objective good.
But they're much more complicated than we want to think they are.
They're not like, you know, you're right and I'm wrong.
They're not like your taste is ridiculous and my taste is great.
And these poets were actually thinking about this, and they actually came up with answers that are important.
And when you take those answers and you go back to the Gospels, you suddenly hear what Jesus is saying and you think, oh, I get it.
At least I do.
And that's, like I said, it's a tremendously joyful experience.
That is.
So we've only got a few more minutes.
We could get into a whole lot here, but we could go on for probably millennia discussing the goodness and the truth and the beauty.
As we do, yeah.
Do you think for someone reading the book that they need to like poetry, that they need to be familiar with John Keats and Shelley and Wordsworth, that they need to, or can a layman walk in and pick up the book?
You don't have to come into the book liking poetry because it's about the people and it's about the things that they did and the things that they experienced in the world.
I hope that when you come out of it, you'll think like, oh, I get why people read poetry, if nothing else, you know, and want to turn to some of these poets.
But you don't have to come in liking poetry because as I say, it's not a book of literary criticism.
It's a book about really me trying to figure out how to read the Gospels in a productive, joyful, and original way.
Now, you already wrote a memoir.
You've written fiction for your entire life, I think.
And so now we're talking about four or five centuries of consistent 14 hours of fiction.
I started chiseling it into rock.
Not everybody knows that.
The advent of the printing press is great.
But you'd written fiction and then you kind of broke with that and you said, I'm going to write my memoir, The Great Good Thing, another phenomenal book.
This is also a kind of a memoir.
So we've talked about the Jesus of it all.
We've talked about the poets.
Where is the you of it all and why write a second sort of memoir?
Well, you know, When you spend your life reading so much, when you love books as much as I do, when you love art and literature as much as I do, you have a choice.
Either you become an aesthete who just cares about the beauty of it, who thinks art is for art's sake, or you begin to know, realize that if you let it, art will transform you for the good.
And I came to Jesus through art.
I discovered Jesus through literature, not through religion.
I realized that he was behind so many of the books that I liked, so that I started to investigate him, and that sort of drew me to him.
And I think that a lot of people, and I've known a lot of people, a lot of college professors, a lot of literary people, don't let the works affect them.
They just appreciate them as beautiful.
But to me, that's not the way it works.
When you go to a movie, when you read a book, when you listen to music, something is being done to you.
And if you don't understand what it is, you're not in control of it.
Other people are.
And I think that that is one of the reasons I wanted to say, you know, I have been, my view of art has been revolutionized by finding God because I found God very late and it revolutionized all the way I looked at art.
And I think that everybody's view of art, everybody's view of what happens to them when they go to the movies or listen to a song, everybody's view should be revolutionized in that way so that it begins to work on you for the good and you can stop it from working on you for evil.
And especially in this world where so much of our art is controlled by people who really don't know what's good or true or beautiful, I think it's a good thing to know how to read.
It is a good thing to know how to read.
And that's such an important observation because now we take it as common sense that of course art is merely for art's sake.
There was the Latin version of that phrase, which was actually just created in the modern times.
Ars grazia artis.
It's the slogan of one of the movie studios.
And yet it's not true.
Art is not simply for art's sake.
Art does things.
It has something to do with what is true and what is good.
And it is a transformative thing.
We've known this since good old Uncle Plato.
Wise people have written about this for a very long time.
And so the art that we, the popular art that we see around us right now seems to be extraordinarily degraded.
Very degraded.
So how do we shape ourselves with the better art?
My answer to this, because a lot of people think, oh, we have to censor bad art because so much art, it's not just degraded, it's degrading.
And the things that people listen to, I think, really hurt them and really damage them.
And so the first reaction of political people is always to censor people.
But that's not what I think.
What I think is we should teach people how to approach art, what it is that you do when you open your soul to another soul, which is what art is.
Art is a communication of the inner life of somebody.
You can read stuff that's bad for the good.
You can do that if you know how to do it.
But I think that you're absolutely right that this idea that art is morality free and that if it's beautiful, it's good.
If it's pretty, it's good, is just not true.
And I think that you only have to look at a lot of music now, a lot of hip-hop songs, those kinds of songs that are just, they're just degrading.
They're degrading to the people singing them.
They're degrading to the people listening to them.
But if you listen to them aright, you'll stop.
If you listen to them aright, you'll stop.
But before you stop, you'll get what there is to get out of them for the good.
I love that idea.
It reminds me of the Princess Bride, where the character says, I've been taking this poison in little bits and bits so that I build up my immunity.
And that's how I feel about really bad works of art and bad works of philosophy for that matter.
When I wrote my only book with words, I read mostly terrible radical leftist writing.
And I was able to do that because I'd read a lot of good, conservative, true writing.
And so it doesn't have quite the same effect and transformative effect on the soul if you know what you're getting into going in.
So it's not enough merely to censor it, but it's sometimes said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Build Up Your Immunity00:02:10
So who do you want to spend the most time with?
You know, Dr. Dre and Cardi B, or do you want to spend it with John Keats and Andrew Clavin and Jesus?
I don't know.
That seems like a better idea to me.
I think that actually is the question.
I mean, I actually do think that is the question.
Who do you spend your time with?
And how do you learn who to spend your time with?
Because if you don't hear anything but the latest music, if you don't hear anything but the, see anything but the latest movie, you don't know any better.
You know, you don't know what there are other places to go.
And there really are, and they really are great.
So that's why I say you don't have to come into this book liking poetry at all, but I hope when you come out, you think like, gee, I'd like to read something better than what is actually being piped into my head at the moment.
This is such a good way in.
You know, it's one of the really frustrating things when you read good books is you read a good book and then you finish the book and you've got a list of 10 more books that you have to read because those are the books that the book talks about.
And I'll admit this freely on the air.
I try to present myself as an educated person.
I had not read all of lyrical ballads.
This extraordinarily important book of poetry that this book is largely about.
I hadn't read the whole thing.
And so I said, well, I'm a dummy and my desire has been kindled to shape my soul for the better and to pursue the good.
So I ordered the book afterward.
And so I think if you don't know anything about the poets, if you don't know anything about Andrew Clavin, if you don't know anything about Jesus for that matter, this is a great way to expose yourself to it and then to go on and become friends with all those old dead guys, some of whom are still alive.
And you do find out all these things that you might say, like a sadder but wiser man or water water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.
They actually come from somewhere.
People made them up and they all turn up in so much of this poetry.
That's right.
All right, Drew, that's it.
You've got to go do your show.
So I've got to stop it there.
Everyone needs to go out and buy the book, 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 by the one and only Andrew Clavin.