Bővebb ismertető
Foreword
Poenu of VuLon and Prophecy offers a broad sampling of poetic writings on the human and spiritual condition, stretching back to the Bible and fiomer s mythic accounts of Odysseus s descent into the underworld nearly three thousand years ago to Allen Ginsberg's angiy condemnation of late-twenti-eth-century American industrial capitalism, personified by Moloch.
Homer's OdyMey, Dante's Divine Comedy, Spenser's Faerie Queen, and Milton's Paradide Lo^t—epic invocations on the nature of man, God (or gods), departed spirits, naked maidens, and Lucifer—appear alongside the ecstasy of Rumi, the visions of Coleridge's entrancing Xanadu and haunted Ancient Mariner, and the eerie, melancholy, hallucinatory revelations in Poe's "The Raven" and "Ulalume." William Blake sees "a World in a grain of sand, / And a Heaven in a wild flower," but he also envisions a benighted nineteenth-century London. The brooding dark-night-of-the-soul ruminations in Arnold's "Dover Beach" and Eliot's Tl?e Wojte Land are countered by the firm faith in the existence of God in Dickinson's "I never saw a moor" and in George Herbert's "Easter Wings."
FOREWORD xi
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