The Canon Is Too Big

The Canon Is Too Big

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The one question I get asked most often in interviews is “how did Imperium Press start?” It’s a question I never tire of answering. When I started this thing, all I wanted to do was republish the Iliad and Beowulf and so on, in a way that took them seriously. In a way that didn’t try to read back into them progressive nonsense. In a way that celebrated them and didn’t apologize for them. In a way that the people depicted in those works would have appreciated.

As it turns out, that was too much of an ask. What was I, and now is we, have succeeded wildly in our goals. I have no misgivings in saying that our editions of these books are the best available. But along the way we’ve met resistance—you have no idea how much, because as a rule I don’t post our Ls. There was a time a couple of years ago where the whole project almost fell over because of pressure from very substantial forces. It took about a year to get things back on track but it made us far stronger. They don’t want us to do what we’re doing.

This is all to say that the Western Canon is under attack, and polite society doesn’t want you to read it or take it seriously. You will find on the first page of every book in our Western Canon series the following:

The Western Canon’s value is self-evident. Its status, however, has been under threat since the middle of the 20th century. Feminists, Marxists, intersectionalists, and others deny the Canon’s existence by refusing to observe its traditional boundaries, throwing the borders open to invite all manner of second- and third-rate material. They intentionally misread the Canon, deconstructing it and looking for incoherence where men have only ever found genius.

Imperium Press’ Western Canon series reclaims the Canon from the forces hostile to it. The series offers not only definitive versions of these works, but also supplementary material placing them at the centre of our aesthetic, intellectual, and spiritual life—where they belong.

This has only become more true since we first published the Iliad in 2019. The Canon is under attack and we are doing something about it.

However, we shouldn’t just reflexively take the opposite position of our enemies on every issue—this, too, is to be governed by them. When the left critiques the right by saying we’re all a bunch of temporarily embarrassed kings, they’re not wrong. We do have a problem with too many chiefs, not enough Indians. The left is not often right, but they’re not always wrong either.

There is a sense in which the Canon is flawed. It’s not flawed the way the resentment-fuelled janissary left thinks, but there is a fatal flaw in it. The Western Canon is too big. It doesn’t hang together coherently. It’s too heterogeneous—its elements are locked in conflict. The history of the West itself is in some sense the history of this conflict.