|
Showing 1 - 11 of
11 matches in All Departments
This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the
life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian
Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats,
T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers
worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and
the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All
three writers wrote with a deep commitment to the intellectual life
of Catholicism and saw the new movement in the arts as making
possible for the first time a rich sacramental expression of the
divine beauty in aesthetic form. MacGreevy spent his life trying to
voice the Augustinian vision he found in The City of God. Coffey, a
student of neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, married
scholastic thought and a densely wrought poetics to give form and
solution to the alienation of modern life. Devlin contemplated the
world with the eyes of Montaigne and the heart of Pascal as he
searched for a poetry that could realize the divine presence in the
experience of the modern person. Taken together, MacGreevy, Coffey,
and Devlin exemplify the modern Catholic intellectual seeking to
engage the modern world on its own terms while drawing the age
toward fulfillment within the mystery and splendor of the Church.
They stand apart from their Irish contemporaries for their
religious seriousness and cosmopolitan openness of European
modernism. They lay bare the theological potencies of modern art
and do so with a sophistication and insight distinctive to
themselves. Although MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin have received
considerable critical attention in the past, this is the first book
to study their work comprehensively, from MacGreevy's early poems
and essays on Joyce and Eliot to Coffey's essays in the
neo-scholastic philosophy of science, and on to Devlin's late
poetic attempts to realize Dante's divine vision in a Europe
shattered by war and modern doubt.
Ours is an age full of desires but impoverished in its
understanding of where those desires lead-an age that claims
mastery over the world but also claims to find the world as a whole
absurd or unintelligible. In The Vision of the Soul, James Matthew
Wilson seeks to conserve the great insights of the western
tradition by giving us a new account of them responsive to modern
discontents. The western- or Christian Platonist- tradition, he
argues, tells us that man is an intellectual animal, born to pursue
the good, to know the true, and to contemplate all things in
beauty. Wilson begins by reconceiving the intellectual conservatism
born of Edmund Burke's jeremiad against the French Revolution as an
effort to preserve the West's vision of man and the cosmos as
ordered by and to beauty. After defining the achievement of that
vision and its tradition, Wilson offers an extended study of the
nature of beauty and the role of the fine arts in shaping a culture
but above all in opening the human intellect to the perception of
the form of reality. Through close studies of Theodor W. Adorno and
Jacques Maritain, he recovers the classical vision of beauty as a
revelation of truth and being. Finally, he revisits the ancient
distinction between reason and story-telling, between mythos and
logos, in order to rejoin the two. Story-telling is foundational to
the forms of the fine arts, but it is no less foundational to human
reason. Human life in turn constitutes a specific kind of form-a
story form. The ancient conception of human life as a pilgrimage to
beauty itself is one that we can fully embrace only if we see the
essential correlation between reason and story and the essential
convertibility of truth, goodness and beauty in beauty. By turns a
study in fundamental ontology, aesthetics, and political
philosophy, Wilson's book invites its readers to a renewal of the
West's intellectual tradition.
|
Poetry and Mysticism (Paperback)
Raissa Maritain; Introduction by James Matthew Wilson
|
R178
R145
Discovery Miles 1 450
Save R33 (19%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Gloria
Sam Smith
CD
R407
Discovery Miles 4 070
|