R. S. Thomas and the Between: Welsh Poet and Anglican Priest (1913-2000)
From R S Thomas Collected Later Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). This superb reframing of a old genre (Ben Jonson loaded it with recusant intensity) recalls Desmond’s "intimate…
From R S Thomas Collected Later Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2004). This superb reframing of a old genre (Ben Jonson loaded it with recusant intensity) recalls Desmond’s "intimate…
There is no great literature without nationality, no great nationality without literature. [1] -W.B. Yeats A Nation Once Again What ish my nation? The rhetorical question…
Logos and Mythos in Plato’s Dialogues Metaphor and analogy are a preparation for examining the status and function of mythos in Plato. What does it mean that…
The Incarnation of the Poetic Word: Theological Essays on Poetry and Philosophy. Michael Martin. Kettering OH: Angelico Press, 2017. In these theological and philosophical essays on…
I In the Republic, Socrates holds that there are correlations among the poetic rhythms and the constitutions of state and soul. He does not explicitly tell us…
The Ancient Quarrel between Philosophy and Poetry. Raymond Barfield. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2011. From its beginnings, philosophy’s language, concepts, and imaginative growth have been heavily…
Liu Xiaobo was the Chinese dissident writer and 2010 Nobel Peace Prize recipient who passed away this past June. He died of liver cancer while serving out…
Eric Voegelin developed a rich body of concepts for interpreting literary symbols. This essay will use those concepts to interpret some of the verse of the contemporary…
In a letter to the literary scholar Robert Heilman in 1961 Eric Voegelin expressed his agreement with the view that good literature does not merely imitate or…
In his final writings, Eric Voegelin was preoccupied with paradox as an irreducible aspect of his study of participation, the classical symbol of man’s identity in light…
Voegelin’s exposition of the metaxy (between) in In Search of Order could be summarized this way: the metaxy emerges from the writer’s search for order in experience. …
If I hadn’t been introduced to the metaxy by reading Voegelin in the 80s and William Desmond more recently I would have had to invent it to…
Czeslaw Milosz once told an interviewer that during his long life he had experienced two conditions of terror: the first in Poland under the Nazi and Communist…
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) is considered one of the greatest American poets, perhaps a third after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. He had something of both: a sharp…
The goal of this series of essays is the illumination of individual poems as metaxic spaces. Readers of Voegelinview will recall Glenn Hughes’s ground-breaking essays on Emily…