Anthony M. Esolen

Anthony M. Esolen is a writer, social commentator, translator of classical poetry, and Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College, having been invited to join the faculty in 2023. He previously taught at Furman University, Providence College, Thomas More College of Liberal Arts, and Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.

Esolen has translated into English Dante's Divine Comedy, Lucretius' On the Nature of Things, and Torquato Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered. He is the author of over 30 books and over 1,000 articles in such publications as The Modern Age, The Catholic World Report, Chronicles, for which he serves as a contributing editor, The Claremont Review of Books, The Public Discourse, First Things, Crisis Magazine, The Catholic Thing, and Touchstone, for which he serves as a senior editor. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat, and has written frequently for a host of other online journals. He is a poet in his own right, and his book-length sacred poem, The Hundredfold, has been called a Christian poetic masterpiece.

Esolen, a Catholic, writes on a broad field of topics—literature, the arts, and social commentary—and is known as a conservative and a traditionalist scholar. Professor Esolen, who had taught in the Development of Western Civilization program at Providence College for twenty-seven years, Professor Esolen criticized the concept of "diversity" as the term is commonly used in the modern academy and became the target of a campus protest. The administration's actions in response to this protest influenced his decision to leave Providence College.

Early life and writing Esolen is of Italian ancestry. He was born in Archbald, Pennsylvania. Anthony Esolen graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University in 1981. He pursued graduate work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he earned his M.A. in 1981 and a Ph.D. in Renaissance literature in 1987. Esolen's dissertation, "A Rhetoric of Spenserian Irony," was directed by S.K. Heninger.

Providence College Esolen began teaching English at Providence College in 1990, becoming a full professor in 1995. He is a critic of "diversity" training and guidelines as practiced at many American colleges and universities. In the summer of 2016, he remarked, "What counts for them as 'diversity' is governed entirely by a monotonous and predictable list of current political concerns. If you read a short story written in English by a Latina author living up the road in Worcester, that counts as 'diverse,' but if you read a romance written in Spanish by a Spanish author living in Spain four hundred years ago, that does not count as 'diverse.'"

In September 2016, Crisis Magazine published an article by Esolen titled "My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult."

Esolen held that Catholicism "redeems not only individuals but peoples" preserving their culture as it does so, which is in contrast to "the secular preachers of diversity" who work "their hardest to efface that difference, to muffle all those who speak with the voice of the Church against the vision that those preachers have to offer—a vision that pretends to be 'multicultural,' but that is actually anti-cultural, and is characterized by all the totalitarian impulses to use the massive power of government to bring to heel those who decline to go along." The Rev. Brian Shanley, O.P., President of Providence College at the time, publicly distanced himself from Esolen's statements by claiming "that he speaks only for himself. He certainly does not speak for me, my administration, and for many others at Providence College who understand and value diversity in a very different sense from him."

Subsequent career On May 4, 2017, it was announced that Esolen would join the faculty at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire beginning the fall of 2017. On this occasion, he criticized the Providence College administration for becoming too "secular."

On May 13, 2019, Esolen resigned from Thomas More due to a serious health problem. Esolen later accepted a position closer to his home, as Professor of Humanities and Writer-in-Residence at the former Northeast Catholic College, later Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts.

Literary work Along with teaching, Esolen has published articles and books on a regular basis. He is a regular contributor to Magnificat and serves as a senior editor of Touchstone.

Esolen's verse translation of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy into English was published by Random House Modern Library. His translation of the Inferno appeared in 2002, the Purgatory in 2003, and the Paradise in 2005. In his translations, Esolen chose not to attempt a "preservation of Dante's rhyme in any systematic form." Dante's original Italian work relied heavily on rhyme. However, the English language has fewer rhyming words than the Italian language. Thus, according to Esolen, trying to recreate the sounds of the original Italian rhyme would have compromised "either meaning or music."

In 2011, Esolen published an essay in First Things in which he criticized what he saw as the "bumping boxcar language" of the New American Bible. Esolen cited the NAB translations for "refer[ing] the general to the specific, the abstract to the concrete, the vague to the exact." He went on to list several examples of Biblical passages in which he claimed that the true meaning or visceral nature of the words had been eroded.

Publications

Translations The following works were translated into English by Esolen:

Books The following books were written by Esolen: Defending Marriage: Twelve Arguments for Sanity. May 28, 2014. Reclaiming Catholic Social Teaching. Sophia Institute Press. October 20, 2014. Life Under Compulsion: Ten Ways to Destroy the Humanity of Your Child. Intercollegiate Studies Institute May 18, 2015. Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church. TAN Books December 7, 2016.

Defending Boyhood: How Building Forts, Reading Stories, Playing Ball, and Praying to God Can Change the World. TAN Books March 25, 2019

In the Beginning Was the Word: An Annotated Reading of the Prologue of John. Angelico Press, 2021. Sex and the Unreal City: The Demolition of the Western Mind. Ignatius Press. 2020. No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men. Regnery Publishing. 2022. The Lies of Our Time. Sophia Institute Press. 2023.