Robert Atwan - Böcker

From John Milton to D. H. Lawrence, poets have found creative inspiration in the Bible. This unique two-volume collection encompasses work of a variety of tones - devotional and meditative, sardonic or political - and includes re-enactments of key episodes, lyrical descants on familiar passages, peronal expressions of faith, and veiled social commentaries. Roughly dividing the material between Old and the New Testaments, each volume presents the original biblical passage along with the poem to provide a fascinating new perspective on familiar works of literature. Innovative and comprehensive, Chapters into Verse includes work by Donne, Blake, Keats, Byron, Hopkins, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and many many more.

From John Milton to D. H. Lawrence, poets have found creative inspiration in the Bible. This unique two-volume collection encompasses work of a variety of tones - devotional and meditative, sardonic or political - and includes re-enactments of key episodes, lyrical descants on familiar passages, personal expressions of faith, and veiled social commentaries.Roughly dividing the material between Old and the New Testaments, each volume presents the original biblical passage along with the poem to provide a fascinating new perspective on familiar works of literature. Innovative and comprehensive, Chapters into Verse includes work by Donne, Blake, Keats, Byron, Hopkins, Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Hardy, Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Sylvia Plath, and many many more.

The Bible is by far the leading source of inspiration for Western literature, and in particular, the life of Jesus has drawn the attention of artists and writers throughout the ages. Now, in a volume of astonishing range and originality, Robert Atwan, George Dardess, and Peggy Rosenthal present 280 remarkable poems from world literature focusing on Jesus's life and teaching.Readers accustomed to the predictable inclusions of many anthologies will be surprised and delighted by the diversity of poets represented here, from Aquinas, Dante, de Guevara, Donne, and Sor Juana, to D.H. Lawrence, Gabriela Mistral, Wole Soyinka, Margaret Atwood, Gwendolyn Brooks, Czeslaw Milosz, and Leopold Senghor. Perhaps no other thematically organized anthology could have brought together writers as different as Jorge Luis Borges, Thomas Merton, Alice Walker, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Jack Kerouac. Indeed, simply to turn the page in Divine Inspiration is an adventure in itself. And in terms of form, style, modulations of tone and perspective, the variety here is as unparalleled as it is unpredictable.The editors of Divine Inspiration have done a masterly job of unifying this vast assortment of poems. Organized chronologically around the life of Jesus, the book is divided into nine sections -- from Birth and Infancy,through Healings and Miracles, to the Resurrection -- and presents passages from the Gospels followed by the poems they inspired. This structure gives readers the dual pleasures of a strong narrative pull punctuated by moments of lyric intensity. Our familiarity with the life of Jesus is thus enlivened, deepened, and in some cases wholly transformed by the imaginative power of the poems. In the largest section of the book, on the Passion of Jesus, we find an array of poems by Anna Akhmatova, Antonio Machado, Thomas Hardy, Miguel de Unamuno, Charles Baudelaire, R.S. Thomas, Andrew Marvell, Frederico Garcia Lorca, and Denise Levertov, among others. To see the Passion of Jesus refracted through the lenses of such poets is to see it anew, or more vividly than before. And to encounter Chinese, Korean, Nigerian, Arab, Latin American, Scandinavian, Hungarian, and Greek poets alongside English, French, and German is a testimony both to the editors' devoted scholarship and to the power of Jesus's life to inspire great poetry across a spectrum of cultures and eras.An invaluable sourcebook for students, scholars, and general readers alike, Divine Inspiration should prove equally satisfying to readers with a strong interest in religion and to all lovers of poetry.

Drawing a unique map of the history of English poetry, Chapters Into Verse surveys and defines the literary legacy of the Scriptures from the fourteenth century to the present. Arranged in scriptural order from Genesis to Revelation, the book presents each poem alongside the biblical passage that inspired it. Thus readers can conveniently witness the various ways sacred text has sparked the imagination of poets throughout the ages. The editors have included poems by virtually all the prominent religious poets--among them John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Taylor, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Included, too, are devotional and visionary works from a wide range of vintage poets--Robert Burns, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Proving that the Bible is just as powerful a source of inspiration today as it was in the past, the collection also assembles a mixed congregation of modern and contemporary poets, such as Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Countee Cullen, e.e. cummings, William Butler Yeats, Laura (Riding) Jackson, A.D. Hope, Denise Levertov, and Philip Levine. Of enduring interest to readers of both scripture and literature, this anthology illuminates key passages of the Old and New Testament. In selection after selection, readers will encounter an astonishing variety of religious experiences, as a host of poets from many eras and many backgrounds respond to Holy Scripture profoundly and imaginatively.

André Aciman “quite simply, one of the finest essayists of the last hundred years” (Los Angeles Review of Books) and one of the most poignant stylists of his generation, selects the best essays of the year from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites.