This work is not only a general inquiry into ecstatic states of consciousness and an historical outline of the ecstatic poetic tradition but also an intensive study of five representative poets--Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tagore. In a refreshingly original, wide-ranging engagement with concepts in psychology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and history, this book demonstrates that the poetics and aesthetics of ecstasy represent an ancient, ubiquitous theory of poetry that continues to influence writers in the current century.
This work is not only a general inquiry into ecstatic states of consciousness and an historical outline of the ecstatic poetic tradition but also an intensive study of five representative poets--Rumi, Wordsworth, Whitman, Dickinson, and Tagore. In a refreshingly original, wide-ranging engagement with concepts in psychology, religion, philosophy, aesthetics, sociology and history, this book demonstrates that the poetics and aesthetics of ecstasy represent an ancient, ubiquitous theory of poetry that continues to influence writers in the current century.
'Wild Poets of Ecstasy' brings together ancient and modern poetry from the world's literary treasuries. Containing poems from over 100 secular and religious writers, this anthology is a sustained celebration of human beings in their best monuments.
While The Language of Love is quite literally dedicated to conveying love and passion, the subject of this collection of powerful poems is quite surprising. It's you! This new compilation of verses from Ray Buchanan uses the ancient Sufi poetic tradition to present fresh ruminations on the nature of God and spirituality. Buchanan here offers love poems of a radically different sort: they are written from the perspective and in the voice of the Creator, dedicated to his creations all over the world rather than to a physical lover. Let the love of the divine wash over you through these inspirational lines-and bring you peace. Buchanan's poetry reveals the full depth of the Creator's love. God longs for oneness with every single person on this earth-and accepting this can lead us to true ecstasy. We all long for the Creator's love, a fact we may not even realize. Not until we are faced with the fullness of God's devotion can we understand this simple spiritual truth. Buchanan hopes his work will inspire you to open your own heart and find the ecstatic joy he feels every day as one of God's creations.
Fascination with quotidian experience in modern art, literature, and philosophy promotes ecstatic forms of reflection on the very structure of the everyday world. Gosetti-Ferencei examines the ways in which modern art and literature enable a study of how we experience quotidian life. She shows that modernism, while exhibiting many strands of development, can be understood by investigating how its attentions to perception and expectation, to the common quality of things, or to childhood play gives way to experiences of ecstasis&—the stepping outside of the ordinary familiarity of the world. While phenomenology grounds this study (through Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Bachelard), what makes this book more than a treatise on phenomenological aesthetics is the way in which modernity itself is examined in its relation to the quotidian. Through the works of artists and writers such as Benjamin, C&ézanne, Frost, Klee, Newman, Pollock, Ponge, Proust, Rilke, Robbe-Grillet, Rothko, Sartre, and Twombly, the world of quotidian life can be seen to harbor a latent ecstasis. The breakdown of the quotidian through and after modernism then becomes an urgent question for understanding art and literature in its capacity to further human experience, and it points to the limits of phenomenological explications of the everyday.
A stunning collection of poems by Mirabai, the fifteenth-century female Indian ecstatic poet. Like Coleman Barks's translations of Rumi, this collection of poems by Mirabai will appeal to anyone interested in spiritual poetry.
As well as producing one of the finest of all poetic traditions, ancient Greek culture produced a major tradition of poetic theory and criticism. Halliwell's volume offers a series of detailed and challenging interpretations of some of the defining authors and texts in the history of ancient Greek poetics: the Homeric epics, Aristophanes' Frogs, Plato's Republic, Aristotle's Poetics, Gorgias's Helen, Isocrates' treatises, Philodemus' On Poems, and Longinus On the Sublime. The volume's fundamental concern is with how the Greeks conceptualized the experience of poetry and debated the values of that experience. The book's organizing theme is a recurrent Greek dialectic between ideas of poetry as, on the one hand, a powerfully enthralling experience in its own right (a kind of 'ecstasy') and, on the other, a medium for the expression of truths which can exercise lasting influence on its audiences' views of the world. Citing a wide range of modern scholarship, and making frequent connections with later periods of literary theory and aesthetics, Halliwell questions many orthodoxies and received opinions about the texts analysed. The resulting perspective casts new light on ways in which the Greeks attempted to make sense of the psychology of poetic experience - including the roles of emotion, ethics, imagination, and knowledge - in the life of their culture.
Originally published in 1976, with more than 75,000 copies in print, this collection of poems by fifteenth-century ecstatic poet Kabir is full of fun and full of thought. Columbia University professor of religion John Stratton Hawley has contributed an introduction that makes clear Kabir's immense importance to the contemporary reader and praises Bly's intuitive translations. By making every reader consider anew their religious thinking, the poems of Kabir seem as relevant today as when they were first written.
In much of the critical discourse of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, scholars employed suspicion in order to reveal a given text's complicity with various undesirable ideologies and/or psychopathologies. Construed as such, interpretive practice was often intended to demystify texts and authors by demonstrating in them the presence of false consciousness, bourgeois values, patriarchy, orientalism, heterosexism, imperialist attitudes, and/or various neuroses, complexes, and lacks. While it proved to be of vital importance in literary studies, suspicious hermeneutics often compelled scholars to interpret eudaimonia, or well-being variously conceived, in pathologized terms. At the end of the twentieth century, however, literary scholars began to see the limitations of suspicion, conceived primarily as the discernment of latent realities beneath manifest illusions. In the last decade, often termed the "post-theory era," there was a radical shift in focus, as scholars began to recognize the inapplicability of suspicion as a critical framework for discussions of eudaimonic experiences, seeking out several alternative forms of critique, most of which can be called, despite their differences, a hermeneutics of affirmation. In such alternative reading strategies scholars were able to explore configurations of eudaimonia, not by dismissing them as bad politics or psychopathology but in complex ways that have resulted in a new eudaimonic turn, a trans-disciplinary phenomenon that has also enriched several other disciplines. The Eudaimonic Turn builds on such work, offering a collection of essays intended to bolster the burgeoning critical framework in the fields of English, Comparative Literature, and Cultural Studies by stimulating discussions of well-being in the "post-theory" moment. The volume consists of several examinations of literary and theoretical configurations of the following determinants of human subjectivity and the role these play in facilitating well-being: values, race, ethics/morality, aesthetics, class, ideology, culture, economics, language, gender, spirituality, sexuality, nature, and the body. Many of the authors compelling refute negativity bias and pathologized interpretations of eudaimonic experiences or conceptual models as they appear in literary texts or critical theories. Some authors examine the eudaimonic outcomes of suffering, marginalization, hybridity, oppression, and/or tragedy, while others analyze the positive effects of positive affect. Still others analyze the aesthetic response and/or the reading process in inquiries into the role of language use and its impact on well-being, or they explore the complexities of strength, resilience, and other positive character traits in the face of struggle, suffering, and "othering."
