Mark A. Signorelli

Mark A. Signorelli
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Mark Anthony Signorelli is an essayist, playwright, and poet, who is committed to reviving the old ways of writing essays, plays, and poems.  He has spent a very large portion of his life producing work in such highly unfashionable genres as the traditional "fourteener" ballad and blank-verse tragedy (which may, in part, explain why you have never heard of him).  He currently serves as a Contributing Editor for the New English Review, a web journal, where he has written on the poverty and absurdity of contemporary philosophical materialism and on the need to return to the broad tradition of humanist, literary learning.  He lived for five years in the seaside town of Ocean Grove, NJ, one of the most charming and distinctive locales on the east coast, where he frequently sat on his very non-figurative front porch, and conversed with his neighbors sitting on their adjacent and equally non-figurative front porch (this is probably his only real qualification to write for FPR).  He now resides elsewhere in central Jersey with his wife - like Penelope, a woman of great arete. Visit Mark's website to see more of his writings!

Recent Essays

Going Home Again? Not Likely.

If I am correct, it seems there is a certain kind of arch-typical narrative that has become quite popular here at FPR, and in...

The Springs of the Scamander

One of the most memorable passages in the Iliad occurs in Book 22, during the climactic scene when Achilles is chasing Hector around the...

Upcoming Poetry Readings

For those readers who might be interested, I've recently published my first collection of poems, Distant Lands and Near, available here.  Also, those who are aficionados...

A Letter from Old Nick to Candidate Santorum

Sir, I write this letter to protest the public and wholly unwarranted attack on my character you have made during the course of your campaign,...

A Burke for Our Times

Edmund Burke was the greatest master of the English language, not even excepting Shakespeare.  It is no doubt a startling claim, but one that...

A Burke for Our Times

In a wonderful article published here at FPR a few weeks ago, Jason Peters argued that a proper education ought to provoke a kind...

A Burke for Our Times

Several weeks ago, at the web journal Humane Pursuits, James Banks published an article entitled “Community as We Know It, Not as We Wish...

Democracy and Coercion

Like other readers here at FPR, and across the web, I have been following the Great Salyer/Carter Debate of 2012 with much interest. I...

A Tale of Two Symbolic Systems

I am angry with my friend; he has betrayed a secret of mine perhaps, or maybe instead he has formed an intimacy with persons...

Vico on Probable Knowledge

I would submit that the new conception of rationality we need is really the old one, the humanist one.

Thoughts on the British Riots

They do not smash shop windows to get their hands on plasma televisions, because their parents' wealth makes such toys readily available to them, but they really have no greater desire in life than to have a plasma television

My Nephew Jonathan

What I wish for Jonathan is a culture rooted in that wonder and humility which fecundates all authentic wisdom; a culture directed by the grand human imperative of conjoining our efforts to the effort of our Creator; a culture which will enable him, and not hinder him, from realizing all of the potential which nature planted in him at his birth.