Rosenthal - Böcker

In Running to Paradise, M.L. Rosenthal, hailed by the Times Literary Supplement as "one of the most important critics of twentieth-century poetry," leads us through the lyric poetry and poetic drama of our century's greatest poet in English. His readings shed new, vivid light on Yeats's daring uses of tradition, his love poetry, and the way he faced the often tragic realities of revolution and civil war. Running to Paradise describesYeats's whole effort--sometimes leavened by wild humor--to convey, with high poetic integrity, his passionate sense of his own life and of his chaotic era.Himself a noted poet, Rosenthal stresses Yeats's artistry andpsychological candor. The book ranges from his early exquisite lyrical poems and folklore-rooted plays, through the tougher-minded, more confessional mature work (including the sublime achievement of The Tower), and then to the sometimes "mad" yet often brilliant tragic or comic writing of his last years. Quoting extensively from Yeats, Rosenthal charts the gathering force with which the poet confronted his major life-issues: his art's demands, his persistent but hopeless love for onewoman, the complexities of marriage to another woman at age 52, and his distress during Ireland's "Troubles." Yeats's deep absorption in female sensibility, in the cycles of history and human thought, and insupernaturalism and "the dead" comes strongly into play as well.

Dr Rosenthal describes the contemporary spiritual and intellectual crisis of Islam. The unity of religion and politics, essential in classical Islam, has largely disappeared. In Islam there has been no counterpart of the Reformation in the West; and, in the absence of radical reform, a vulnerable religious and political system has capitulated step by step to a secular nationalism which in turn has grown out of resentment of foreign influence and domination. The result is a very confused situation, close analysis of which is essential to an understanding of the place of Islam in the modern national state. Dr Rosenthal bases part of his book on the available source material; but the greater part derives from personal observation during visits to Pakistan, India, Malaya, Iran, Turkey, Tunisia and Morocco. He writes always as a detached observer and does not apply the criteria of the West to what are essentially Muslim dilemmas and problems.