A Trilogy bringing together titles by John O'Meara that are also individually available from iUniverse.

"The Modern Debacle"

Containing close readings of work by Beckett, Hemingway, and T.S.Eliot; Tennessee Williams, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and Brecht; Plath, Hughes, and Robert Graves, and W.B. Yeats.

"beautifully and fluently written and ingenious in its combination of catastrophes"

--Anthony Gash, Drama Head, The University of East Anglia

"Myth, Depravity, Impasse"

An in-depth study of Robert Graves, the modern theory of myth and Ted Hughes, with further reference to Shakespeare and to Keats.

"I am very sympathetic to the cause of myth and especially in relation to literature"

--Michael Bell, author of "Literature, Modernism and Myth" in a letter to John O'Meara

"This Life, This Death"

An extensive study of Wordsworth's great life-crisis, with additional reference to S.T. Coleridge, and to P.B. Shelley.

"Of this Wordsworth book, one recognizes its truth, its breadth of coverage and awareness, and above all its depth..."

--Richard Ramsbotham, editor of Vernon Watkins, "New Selected Poems," Carcanet Press.

While over the past four hundred years numerous opinions have been voiced as to Shakespeare's identity, these eleven essays widen the scope of the investigation by regarding Shakespeare, his world, and his works in their interaction with one another. Instead of restricting the search for bits and pieces of evidence from his works that seem to match what he may have experienced, these essays focus on the contemporary milieu-political developments, social and theater history, and cultural and religious pressures-as well as the domestic conditions within Shakespeare's family that shaped his personality and are featured in his works. The authors of these essays, employing the tenets of critical theory and practice as well as intuitive and informed insight, endeavor to look behind the masks, thus challenging the reader to adjudicate among the possible, the probable, the likely, and the unlikely. With the exception of the editor's own piece on Hamlet, Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings presents previously unpublished essays, inviting the reader to embark upon an intellectual adventure into the fascinating terrain of Shakespeare's mind and art.

O Meara s work is the perfect supplement to Ted] Hughes s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, shedding further illumination into those areas where Hughes s penetrating lens finally appears to dim. This work] shines utterly clear light on the path of understanding we may re-win with regard to myth, forcing the reader to face the incredible starkness of the prospect we face and the lack of options ever closing in and also giving the reader the necessary clues to follow, particularly Barfield, Shakespeare and Rudolf Steiner. Richard Ramsbotham, author of "Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I"

Very interesting stuff. Particularly where you parallel the break through the tragic dead end to the transcendental-redemptive solution--that I follow from Macbeth through Lear to the last plays--with the Steinerian view of the same progress. Ted Hughes on "Othello s Sacrifice," Letter to John O Meara, 21 November, 1996, in the Ted Hughes Archives, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

This volume brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production. What emerges is an extensive, uniquely challenging interpretation of the evolution of, for the most part, English literary history, from Shakespeare s time to our own.

excellent Shakespearean explorations The idea of Lutheran depravity without Lutheran grace or Lutheran-Calvinist justification is very strong and original Anthony Gash, author of "The Substance of Shadows: Shakespeare s Dialogue with Plato"

O Meara sets out to demonstrate... the essential fact that full encounter with human depravity was /is] a necessary step in the attaining of true otherworldly] Imagination. Eric Philips-Oxford, on "The New School of the Imagination" from the Sektion fur Schone Wissenschaften, the Goetheanum, "Newsletter," Issue No. 3, Winter/Spring 2008-2009.

Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth, this small book challenges fresh questions about where Wordsworth stood in his poetic production in the great years of creative ferment between 1798 and 1806. Numerous poems are covered from this period, but especially does this book re-think our traditional conception of the relationship between The Prelude and Intimations.Wordsworth is separated from the visionary life he once knew by the interdictive effects of his obsession with The Recluse, the great philosophical poem he never finished. In the meantime he takes up with The Prelude but the essential Wordsworth remains the one who, in Intimations, turns his attention back, yearningly, to the 'visionary gleam'. With The Prelude the epic poet comes through, but Wordsworth the visionary poet is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, "the darkness of the grave," without the life that he once knew.

While over the past four hundred years numerous opinions have been voiced as to Shakespeare's identity, these eleven essays widen the scope of the investigation by regarding Shakespeare, his world, and his works in their interaction with one another. Instead of restricting the search for bits and pieces of evidence from his works that seem to match what he may have experienced, these essays focus on the contemporary milieu-political developments, social and theater history, and cultural and religious pressures-as well as the domestic conditions within Shakespeare's family that shaped his personality and are featured in his works. The authors of these essays, employing the tenets of critical theory and practice as well as intuitive and informed insight, endeavor to look behind the masks, thus challenging the reader to adjudicate among the possible, the probable, the likely, and the unlikely. With the exception of the editor's own piece on Hamlet, Shakespeare the Man: New Decipherings presents previously unpublished essays, inviting the reader to embark upon an intellectual adventure into the fascinating terrain of Shakespeare's mind and art.

This essay in autobiography opens in Eyrecourt, east Galway, and describes an early schooling at Rockwell and the experiences of a Jesuit novice at Emo Court, Co. Laois, and Rathfarnham. John O'Meara read classical studies at University College, Dublin, and after a spell of teaching at Clongowes Wood left in 1942 on a travelling studentship to Oxford, where he gained a doctorate three years later. In 1947 he married Odile de Montfort, whom he met in Dublin. The Singing-Masters is written with singular clarity and leaves an abiding impression of Ireland between the wars - the hothouse atmosphere of a diocesan seminary, the lure of the Irish countryside (Eyrecourt in summer, Tullabeg in winter), a fledgling state increasingly dominated by the Church - drawn into perspective by a visit to Lourdes and by the author's self-questionings. In wartime Oxford, where he met Lutyens, Waugh and Belloc, Dodds and Father D'Arcy, O'Meara comes of spiritual and intellectual age, linking Ireland once more to the traditions of theological Europe, and finding his singing-masters in Augustine, Eriugena and the Neo-Platonists. With this quiet celebration of selfhood, and in its limpid recall of time gone, John O'Meara has created a classic of its kind

St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, is one of the central figures in the history of Christianity, and City of God is one of his greatest theological works. Written as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, it examines the ancient pagan religions of Rome, the arguments of the Greek philosophers and the revelations of the Bible. Pointing the way forward to a citizenship that transcends worldly politics and will last for eternity, City of God represents a dramatic turning point in the unfolding of Christian doctrine.

The new introduction by Gill Evans examines the text in the light of contemporary Greek and Roman thought and political change. It demonstrates the importance of religious and literary influences on St. Augustine and his significance as a Christian thinker.Includes new introduction, chronology, and bibliography

This book presents an in-depth view of the extraordinary revisionist language Shakespeare gives to his most royal of all kings, from the time Richard falls dramatically out of favor with God.

Readers will find this book most useful in seeking to disentangle the play's notoriously elaborate verbal presentation, but what the author brings out in connection with Richard's approach to language should move performers themselves to seek to present in future a more creatively dynamic Richard than the one we have thus far been required to accept.

Especially does this book help one to see more clearly how before Shakespeare's difficult re-emergence in his late plays, before all the tragedy, before the fall, there was-God.

"John O'Meara's...work...displays an alert and delicate sensitivity to language and metaphor..." Arthur Kinney, English Language Notes

Cover Photo:

by RegWilson

(c) The Royal Shakespeare Company

Alan Howard as Richard II

in the 1980

Royal Shakespeare Company Production

at Stratford-Upon-Avon

Back Photo

by

A.

Arguably the most authoritative primary source for what is known about medieval Ireland, this lively history by a twelfth-century Norman describes the land’s topography, natural resources, and inhabitants in vivid detail. Maps.

A Trilogy bringing together titles by John O'Meara that are also individually available from iUniverse.

"The Modern Debacle"

Containing close readings of work by Beckett, Hemingway, and T.S.Eliot; Tennessee Williams, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, and Brecht; Plath, Hughes, and Robert Graves, and W.B. Yeats.

"beautifully and fluently written and ingenious in its combination of catastrophes"

--Anthony Gash, Drama Head, The University of East Anglia

"Myth, Depravity, Impasse"

An in-depth study of Robert Graves, the modern theory of myth and Ted Hughes, with further reference to Shakespeare and to Keats.

"I am very sympathetic to the cause of myth and especially in relation to literature"

--Michael Bell, author of "Literature, Modernism and Myth" in a letter to John O'Meara

"This Life, This Death"

An extensive study of Wordsworth's great life-crisis, with additional reference to S.T. Coleridge, and to P.B. Shelley.

"Of this Wordsworth book, one recognizes its truth, its breadth of coverage and awareness, and above all its depth..."

--Richard Ramsbotham, editor of Vernon Watkins, "New Selected Poems," Carcanet Press.

O Meara s work is the perfect supplement to Ted] Hughes s Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, shedding further illumination into those areas where Hughes s penetrating lens finally appears to dim. This work] shines utterly clear light on the path of understanding we may re-win with regard to myth, forcing the reader to face the incredible starkness of the prospect we face and the lack of options ever closing in and also giving the reader the necessary clues to follow, particularly Barfield, Shakespeare and Rudolf Steiner. Richard Ramsbotham, author of "Who Wrote Bacon? William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I"

Very interesting stuff. Particularly where you parallel the break through the tragic dead end to the transcendental-redemptive solution--that I follow from Macbeth through Lear to the last plays--with the Steinerian view of the same progress. Ted Hughes on "Othello s Sacrifice," Letter to John O Meara, 21 November, 1996, in the Ted Hughes Archives, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia

This volume brings together virtually all of the published shorter critical work of John O Meara, gathered from over 30 years of production. What emerges is an extensive, uniquely challenging interpretation of the evolution of, for the most part, English literary history, from Shakespeare s time to our own.

excellent Shakespearean explorations The idea of Lutheran depravity without Lutheran grace or Lutheran-Calvinist justification is very strong and original Anthony Gash, author of "The Substance of Shadows: Shakespeare s Dialogue with Plato"

O Meara sets out to demonstrate... the essential fact that full encounter with human depravity was /is] a necessary step in the attaining of true otherworldly] Imagination. Eric Philips-Oxford, on "The New School of the Imagination" from the Sektion fur Schone Wissenschaften, the Goetheanum, "Newsletter," Issue No. 3, Winter/Spring 2008-2009.

Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of Wordsworth's birth, this small book challenges fresh questions about where Wordsworth stood in his poetic production in the great years of creative ferment between 1798 and 1806. Numerous poems are covered from this period, but especially does this book re-think our traditional conception of the relationship between The Prelude and Intimations.Wordsworth is separated from the visionary life he once knew by the interdictive effects of his obsession with The Recluse, the great philosophical poem he never finished. In the meantime he takes up with The Prelude but the essential Wordsworth remains the one who, in Intimations, turns his attention back, yearningly, to the 'visionary gleam'. With The Prelude the epic poet comes through, but Wordsworth the visionary poet is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, "the darkness of the grave," without the life that he once knew.

The period covered in this book ranges from the early part of the 20th century right through to its end-roughly from the death of Chekhov to that of Ted Hughes. The question is raised whether the vision of the modern world that opened up to the authors of this period does not still apply in our own time.

The book's main theme is the finality of modern nothingness. What remains that is superhumanly possible, despite all appearances that nothing more and nothing new is left to man to break through with? Civilization for these authors had become denuded of all of its vital forces, and it is as if when faced with the prospect of hopelessness, they would have to invoke the help of the one Power on Whom humankind can rely to see them through the worst.

This is the Great Mother or Goddess Who is directly associated with the experience of Nature as this comes down to us from before the straitened confines of the 20th century.

It is the experience modern man would deny at the risk of cutting himself off from the one life-giving source that he has.

Front Cover Illustration: From Jerome Robbins' 1963 Broadway production of "Mother Courage," with Anne Bancroft as Mother Courage and Zohra Lampert as Kattrin.

Back Cover Photo by A.F.

As the third part of his trilogy on Shakespeare, "Prospero's Powers" extends the study of the late plays O'Meara offered in "Othello's Sacrifice," to consider more closely how Shakespeare fulfills his personal artistic development in "The Tempest."

The play is seen as expressing in its structure the whole of Shakespeare's tragic development up to that time. Great powers of self-knowledge and of inner knowledge of the cosmos are shown to have emerged from this development, which Prospero now embodies. Structural links are pursued that further connect Prospero's powers with the mysterious process of selfgrowth that is dramatized in "The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz."

Behind both works, and the Renaissance alchemical tradition they mediate, lies the mystery of the sacrificial death of the Sophia into human consciousness that was taking place at that time. From the event of this death come the great possibilities of self-development and inner power over the world that Shakespeare boldly prophesizes in the play that brings his artistic career to consummation.

"an excellent and profound study"

-Richard Ramsbotham, "Who Wrote Bacon?: William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and James I"

How can we know the great Goddess again? How worthy are we of that mythical experience? How are we related to that experience in our deepest depravity? And why has the mythical experience grown so opaque to us in our post-Romantic, modern world.

These are the main issues arising out of Western literary tradition that John O'Meara explores in this book.

In the work of Robert Graves, Shakespeare, and Keats, O'Meara sees the deepest expression at once of our most far-reaching hopes and our sadly alienated case in respect of any mythical experience we may conceive of having in the immediate future.

This essay offers a radical view of the post-Renaissance, Western literary scene inasmuch as Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy bears a relation to it, principally through his Mystery Plays. A number of major authors are highlighted as having an intrinsic connection with the Anthroposophical revelation-notably T.S. Eliot, and especially S.T. Coleridge. The prospect of a new cultural poetic for the future is outlined in connection especially with these two major figures of English critical-poetic tradition. Other authors that are considered include Wordsworth, Goethe, Lawrence, Yeats; Graves, Hughes; Milton, Swift, and Blake; Strindberg, Hemingway and Beckett. Steiner's Plays were never intended as Literature as we know that discipline today, but they provide a singular point of view from which the idea of Literature can be re-evaluated and new directions set forth that represent a transformed prospect for Literature in the future. Some of our most distinguished authors of the past are seen in a new light, as if it had been their struggle to reach out to the possibilities Steiner's Plays bring forth.

This collection of texts, in presenting Rudolf Steiner's highly evolved understanding of the nature of thinking, points the direction to take today to carry on with the work of Goethe, of Coleridge and of Emerson as the three principal spokesmen for Romantic Imagination in 19th century Europe and America.

Their Romantic epoch came to an end, because the creative thought that served that epoch could not fully satisfy the requirements of thinking or the further necessity of theory that properly characterize our own age.

But Romantic tradition continues, with the full theory and culture of thinking that Rudolf Steiner elaborated, who should satisfy our sense of what we need to support a recovery of the Imagination in our own time.

As Steiner put it-we need today to: "provide knowing with a firm basis through the fact that the world of ideas, in its essential being, is seen connected with nature, in order then, within the world of ideas thus consolidated, to advance to an experience beyond the sense world."

Recent interest in who Shakespeare's Muse may have been prompts one to come forth to dispel the drastically simplistic notions that have been brought forward. In this essay John O'Meara suggests where our concern with Shakespeare should actually lie or what form of Muse we can suppose it was that commanded his development the way it did.

Shakespeare was fated for a certain experience from which he could not extricate himself, even if he had wished to. Highlighted is his struggle with Martin Luther's injunction to imagine human depravity to the fullest, with which O'Meara compares the route travelled by Christopher Marlowe. The challenge was laid down to Shakespeare to imagine the worst of human tragedy, which finally focuses for him in the precipitated death of the loved one.

But it testifies to the enduring power of Shakespeare's Muse that She has 'borne' this death with him.

"I find myself very much in sympathy with your general approach."
-Stanley Wells, general editor of The Oxford Shakespeare and formerly Director of The Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-Upon-Avon, England