The Ground of Our Beseeching: Metaphor and the Poetics of MeditationThis book describes the signature styles of meditation in three American poets, and shows how each generated language out of spiritual yearning. Beginning with a survey of twentieth-century thinking on metaphor, the study concentrates on hermeneutical theories of figurative language as forged by continental philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Paul Ricoeur, and Gaston Bachelard. It arrives at a view of metaphor as an analogue of faith, and traces the development of metaphorical practice in the later, meditative sequences of Eliot, Stevens, and Roethke. The book also explores the ways in which both the lengthening poetic structures and the transcendent desires of each poet determine the kind of metaphor that arises, and also the way in which metaphor itself is able to transport each poet to a hitherto unreachable expression of faith, whether in an identifiable deity, as was Eliot's case, or in a more maverick apprehension of the transcendent, as in Stevens and Roethke. Metaphor comes to embody the qualities of possibility, confidence, and expectation usually manifested in orthodox expressions of religious faith. Peter Sharpe is Professor of English at Wagner College. |
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Page 24
... secular " ; and how , sec- ondly , their " spiritual figurations " effect a useful , compassionate ethos . I seek to identify and portray in these meditative poets an often obscured and displaced religious sensibility so startling since ...
... secular " ; and how , sec- ondly , their " spiritual figurations " effect a useful , compassionate ethos . I seek to identify and portray in these meditative poets an often obscured and displaced religious sensibility so startling since ...
Page 25
... secular beings on a physical plane into ontological significance . The process I will describe is hermeneutic : metaphors intrinsic to this mode of thought provide interpretative models for successively " ex- panded horizons " of being ...
... secular beings on a physical plane into ontological significance . The process I will describe is hermeneutic : metaphors intrinsic to this mode of thought provide interpretative models for successively " ex- panded horizons " of being ...
Page 26
... secular faith , expressed as profound reverence for the world and humility and uncertainty before it . As motto for this project , I assume Stevens's question : " What , then , is the nature of poetry in a time of disbelief ? " ( OP ...
... secular faith , expressed as profound reverence for the world and humility and uncertainty before it . As motto for this project , I assume Stevens's question : " What , then , is the nature of poetry in a time of disbelief ? " ( OP ...
Page 32
... secular purposes , having expanded the ordinary , secular ranges of the terms . Similarly , a view of human personality can be analogically projected to mime the condition of deity , whereupon we may then reverse the process and ...
... secular purposes , having expanded the ordinary , secular ranges of the terms . Similarly , a view of human personality can be analogically projected to mime the condition of deity , whereupon we may then reverse the process and ...
Page 33
... secular notion of " attentive liv- ing " 46 to the discussion of faith . Real spiritual life , says Nouwen , " makes us so alert and aware of the world around us , that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and ...
... secular notion of " attentive liv- ing " 46 to the discussion of faith . Real spiritual life , says Nouwen , " makes us so alert and aware of the world around us , that all that is and happens becomes part of our contemplation and ...
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Common terms and phrases
abstraction aesthetic affirmation American poetry Bachelard become belief blue Burnt Norton canto centre Christian cloud consciousness contemplation Dame Julian dark death Derrida divine Dry Salvages East Coker edited Emerson epiphora epistemology Essays eternal experience Faber faith fictive figure final fire flux Four Quartets Gadamer God's ground Harold Bloom hermeneutical human I. A. Richards Ibid idea identity imagination immanence Incarnation infused kerygma language light linguistic Little Gidding living Logos MacCullough meaning meditative meditative poetic meta metaphor metaphysics mind modern mystical nature Nietzsche object one's ontological passage pattern perception perspective poem poet poet's poetic of meditation possible prayer reality realm religious reverie Ricoeur Roethke's rose rose-garden says secular semantic sense soul spirit Stevens's Stevensian Supreme Fiction T. S. Eliot temporal Theodore Roethke things thought tion TR CP transcendent trope truth TSE CP turn University Press vision Wallace Stevens words WS CP York
Popular passages
Page 79 - A man's power to connect his thought with its proper symbol, and so to utter it, depends on the simplicity of his character, that is, upon his love of truth and his desire to communicate it without loss.
Page 103 - From the wide window towards the granite shore The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying Unbroken wings And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices And the weak spirit quickens to rebel For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell...
Page 241 - Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Page 159 - And there appeared to them tongues as of fire, distributed and resting on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.
Page 227 - Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life, whose fountains are within.
Page 136 - Here and there does not matter We must be still and still moving Into another intensity For a further union, a deeper communion Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning.
Page 254 - Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low, Each like a corpse within its grave, until Thine azure sister of the spring shall blow Her clarion o'er the dreaming earth...
Page 106 - They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer. They know and do not know, that acting is suffering And suffering is action. Neither does the actor suffer Nor the patient act. But both are fixed In an eternal action, an eternal patience To which all must consent...
Page 272 - ... reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete; the idea, with the image; the individual, with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness, with old and familiar objects...
Page 181 - Let's see the very thing and nothing else. Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight. Burn everything not part of it to ash. Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky Without evasion by a single metaphor.