This book is an anthology of poems written by residents in jails and prisons in United States. Originally these poems were written by inmates for inmates, but the values of these poems are also for the free-people who decide about their life independently from the State. These poems have been written in cells of concrete and steel, by people who learned how to express their emotions perhaps for the first time. Jails and Prisons do transform men and women into men and women better than what they were before entering them. For the inmates that submerge themselves to the penance of putting their inside-feelings on paper, life in jail changes them. What these poets write is worthy of our reading. Intense and suffered poetry touches the receiving reader no less than the confessing writer. This treasure of the poetry of a special kind of human beings in captivity is truly capable of speaking to the people who walk freely in society.

When in 1973 this book was written, Emilio Betti and Giovan Battista Vico were almost unknown even within the places of High Learning, like the Colleges and the Universities. No better sort had been obtained by semi imported German scholars like Martin Heidegger and Georg Gadamer. Vico was officially introduced to America by Giorgio Tagliacozzo, the founder of Vico Studies journal, the product of Vico Institute of New York and Emory University, Department of Philosophy. These agencies, however, flourished from the1980' and continued through the first decade of the 21st century. If we include, within our present consideration, the decade of the 1970s, then we can say that for the last four decades the philosopher of Naples, Vico, constituted with his own ideas about history and the nature of nations the background of the thought of Betti's theory of hermeneutics and also a challenging obstacle to the theories of Heidegger, Heidegger's disciples and Georg Gadamer. Even though Betti during this interval of forty years, thanks also to Richard Palmer's publications, has become much more known and discussed by scholars in various field of studies and in different languages, we believe that our book by showing the true roots of Betti's grown hermeneutic tree offers unexpected insights and analysis. This book, having been a doctoral thesis in its first format, has been known only by two or three individuals and then, after a copy reached the Library of Congress, has been almost forgotten. CreateSpace made possible its publishing by my repeating on the track of the old Remington Typewriter with my Ausus computer the long walk with my older fingers. I did it more for my own pleasure and ego and for a celebration of Vico and Betti to which I wish to return in my studies. I recommend the reading of the Content of this book together with the Index; they will be available for download.

Vico's earliest extant scholarly works, the six orations on humanistic education, offer the first statement of ideas that Vico would continue to refine throughout his life. Delivered between 1699 and 1707 to usher in the new academic year at the University of Naples, the orations are brought together here for the first time in English in an authoritative translation based on Gian Galeazzo Visconti's 1982 Latin/Italian edition.

In the lectures, Vico draws liberally on the classical philosophical and legal traditions as he explores the relationship between the Greek dictum "Know thyself" and liberal education. As he sets forth the values and goals of a humanist curriculum, Vico reveals the beginnings of the anti-Cartesian position he will pursue in On the Study Methods of Our Time (1709). Also found in the orations are glimpses of Vico's later views on the theory of interpretation and on the nature of language, imagination, and human creativity, along with many themes that were to be fully developed in his magnum opus, the New Science (1744).

On Humanistic Education joins a number of translations of Vico's works available in paperback from Cornell On the Study Methods of Our Time, On the Most Ancient Wisdom of the Italians, the New Science, and The Autobiography of Giambattista Vico. It will be welcomed by Vichians and their students, intellectual historians, and others in the fields of philosophy, literary theory, history and methods of education, classics, and rhetoric."