The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America - Softcover

Whyte, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385484186 ISBN 13: 9780385484183

Publisher: Crown Currency, 1996

Synopsis

In the middle of the road of my life I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost
-DANTE

Like Dante, many of today's corporate workers find themselves lost in the day-to-day duties of their jobs. Our lives seem shaken by the events of September 11 and the seemingly endless examples of corporate scandal, it's become more difficult than ever to find meaning in the workplace.

Has your work lost its meaning? Are you afraid of pursuing your dreams for fear of failing or--worse--getting fired? Do you yearn to find creativity, and even joy, in your job?

In The Heart Aroused, David Whyte brings his unique perspective as poet and consultant to the workplace, showing readers how fulfilling work can be when they face their fears and follow their dreams. Going beneath the surface concerns about products and profits, organization and order, Whyte addresses the needs of the heart and soul, and the fears and desires that many workers keep hidden.

Through the poetry of both classic and modern masters, Whyte helps readers find both professional and personal fulfillment. In Beowulf, Whyte uncovers the key to confronting office conflicts. Like the poem's courageous hero, readers will travel to the belly of the beast of a problem and emerge triumphantly with a solution. The poems of Pablo Neruda help on find inner silence even in the busiest, most confining office space. With T.S. Eliot as a guide, Whyte teaches readers to appreciate the need to open themselves up to possible failure--and as a result, probable success.

At a time when corporations are calling on employees for more creativity, dedication, and adaptability, and workers are trying desperately to balance home and work, this revised edition of The Heart Aroused is the essential guide to reinvigorating the soul.

About this title

Review

The call for increased creativity in the workplace brings with it a concomitant challenge: how will the world of cool professionalism stand up to the inevitable heat and volatility that accompanies people's emotional and spiritual lives? It is problematic to assume, poet David Whyte explains, that you can ask people to create and also to behave. The Heart Aroused explores these and related issues in an inspiring, grounded, thought-provoking way, and is the best nonverse book by a poet since Robert Bly's Iron John. Interwoven with carefully selected poems to illustrate Whyte's points, The Heart Aroused is necessary reading for any professional who secretly harbors a poet's soul.

From the Publisher

When The Heart Aroused appeared in hardcover in November 1994, it left readers clamoring for author David Whyte as he crisscrossed the country on the lecture circuit with bestselling authors Clarissa Pinkola Estes (Women Who Run with the Wolves) and Thomas Moore (Care of the Soul). Now available in Currency paperback, The Heart Aroused is poised to reach a new wave of readers.

In this peerless book, Whyte shows how the language of prophecy, poetry, and enlightenment give voice to the most creative--yet hidden--desires. He shows that the best way to respond to the current call for creativity in organizational life is to overcome habitual fear and reticence and bring full, passionate, creative human souls, with all their urgencies and unnamed longings, right inside the office.

When Whyte, who often consults for corporate clients, walks into an organization, it is not just to advise, strategize, and make recommendations. Instead, he clarifies personal--not organizational--difficulties at work by placing them in the age-old context of poetry and story. To follow Whyte through his brilliant, soulful discussions is to raft the turbulent stream of conflicting currents that make up people's lives inside American organizations.

Only a poet could produce such a provocative analysis of today's widespread disenchantment with business--or such a daring prescription for using the classics of poetry to revitalize the soul of corporate America.The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of theSoul in Corporate America by David Whyte. Copyright © 1994 by DavidWhyte.

Edition details

• Publisher: Crown Currency
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0385484186
• ISBN 13: 9780385484183
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 368