Mawlana Jalal al-Din Rumi was one of the greatest poets and mystics of the Islamic world. He was born in Balkh (Korasan) in AD 1207 and died in Konya (Turkey) in AD 1273. This book is an examination of his spiritual and literary heritage. As Annemarie Schimmel, the recipient of the Eleventh Giorgio Della Vida Award in Islamic Studies, has written, 'no other mystic and poet from the Islamic world is as well known in the West as Rumi', and she, more than any Western scholar, is his most celebrated and eloquent interpreter. The scholars who Professor Schimmel has invited to share in her tribute have all added new dimensions to an understanding of Rumi and to his impact on the Islamic world.
Australian poetry is popularly conceived as a tradition founded by the wry, secular and stoic strains of its late-nineteenth-century bush balladeers Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson and ‘Banjo’ Paterson, consolidated into a land-based ‘vigour’ in publications such as the Bulletin. Yet this popular conception relies on not actually consulting the poetry itself, which for well over one hundred and fifty years has been cerebral, introspective, feminine and highly — even experimentally — religious. This book casts Australian poetry in a new light by showing how Australian Christian mystical poetics can be found in every era of Australian letters, how literary hostilities towards women poets, eroticism and contemplation served to stifle a critical appreciation of mystical poetics until recent decades, and how in the twentieth century one Australian Christian mystical poet began to influence another and share their appreciations of Dante, Donne, Traherne, Blake, Wordsworth, Brontë, Rossetti, Hopkins, Yeats, Eliot and Lowell.
This Study Offers A Fresh Perspective On Mysticism In Literature, Relating And Balan¬Cing The Western And Eastern Approaches. It Specifically Looks At The Mystical Poetry Of Coventry Patmore The Francis Thompson Through New Doors Of Perception Available To The Intelligent, Sensitive Indian Scholar, From A Point Of View Important In The Study Of Both Poets. There Are Perceptive Discriminations Made Between Immanent And Transcendental Experience, Between Purgative And Illuminative Stages Of The Mystic Way, And All These Subtle Distinc¬Tions Are Illustrated From Individual Works Of The Two Poets.A Special Strength Of The Work Is Its Use Of The Stylistic Approach To Bring To Light Aspects Of The Delicate Relationship Between Mystical Experience And Its Articulation Through Literary Language. The Book Has A Strong Textual Base And Will Be Of Interest To The General Reader As Well As To The Specialist Eager To Explore Comparative Literary Contexts. ...Mr. Dhar Has Studied The Subject With Loving Care, And He Has Imposed His Own Insight Quietly But Firmly In A Way Which Can Justifiably Be Commended As Original Work. Professor J.R. Watson, University Of Durham, England ...The Analysis Of Patmore S Poetry In The Specific Context Of The Combination Of The Erotic With The Divine Is Important (Chap¬Ter Iii). This Is An Area In Which The Indian Bhakti Poets Have Composed Their Finest Poems...The Discussion Of The Transcen¬Dental And The Immanent Aspects Of Mysticism And Their Impact On Patmore And Thompson Is A Very Refreshing Part Of This Valuable Study And Deserves Appreciation. Professor V.A. Shahane, Osmania University, Hyderabad ...It Is One Of The Attractions Of The Present Book That Dr. Dhar, Writing From Within The Traditions Of India Adds A Further Ring, Learned In His Understanding Of Christianity, Especially In His Sense Of The Central Importance Of The Incarna¬Tion, He Adds The Insights Of Another Spirituality, Not Dissonant But Distinct And So Additionally Illuminating. It Is A Book Much To Be Enjoyed And Savoured. Ronald Tamplin, University Of Exeter
Written from a literary critic’s perspective, Mysticism in Postmodernist Long Poems borrows insights from Religious Studies and critical theory to examine the role of spirituality in contemporary poetry, specifically the genre of the long poem. Descending from Whitman’s Song of Myself, the long poem is often considered the American twentieth-century equivalent of the epic poem, but unlike the epic, it carries few generic expectations aside from the fact that it simply must be long. This makes the form particularly pliable as a tool for spiritual inquiry. The period following World War II is often described as a secular age, but spirituality continued as a concern for poets, as evidenced by this study. These writers look beyond conventional faith systems and instead seek individual paths of understanding; they engage in mysticism, in other words. With chapters on H.D. and Brenda Hillman, Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Charles Wright, and Galway Kinnell and Gary Snyder, this study demonstrates how these poets engage the culture of consumption in the postwar years at the same time they search for opportunities for transcendence. Not content to throw over the earthly in favor of the otherworldly, these poets reject the familiar binary of the worldly and metaphysical to produce distinctive paths of spiritual understanding that fuel what Wright calls a “contemplation of the divine.”
This book contributes to the ongoing discussion of the place of contemporary Galician writer Blanca Andreu’s work within the 1980s post-“novísimo” movement, as part of a larger resurgence of the Surrealist in Spanish poetry and its possible placement in the more recent mystical poetry of Spain. It provides a detailed textual analysis of her poetry, and in doing so reveals not only that her work encompasses notions of the surreal and the mystical but also, although Andreu has so far written entirely in Castilian (Spanish), that her poetry utilizes a variety of traditional Galician and Portuguese symbols and images. In this way her work challenges the boundaries between what we as readers may accept as a solely Castilian, Galician, or Spanish poetic. It bases its transtheoretical framework on findings from such fields as Galician studies, Iberian studies, mysticism studies, paradigm shift studies, and regional studies over the past two decades. Ultimately, this comprehensive and unique study shows how Andreu’s multifaceted transnational work may pertain to, and expand, our knowledge of each of these areas of focus.
One of the significant phenomena in modern Arabic literature since the 1960s has been the use of mystical concepts, figures and motifs for the expression of contemporary experiences, philosophies and ideologies. The book investigates this phenomenon mainly with regard to the creative poetic process and the use of literary masks. It also deals with the complicated relationship between Arabic literature and Islam as well as with the literary activities by religious traditional circles. In a welter of publications committed Muslim authors try to prove that there is no inherent contradiction between art and Islam, and at the same time to lay the theoretical foundations for an "Islamist" poetics encompassing the various branches of literary production. Within the secular canonical circles, however, these activities and texts are considered extremely marginal and none of the authors concerned has gained any canonical status. The growing number of cases, in which attempts at censorship on religious and moral grounds have been challenged, prove also that Arabic literature has become more and more secular.
Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)
