The Complete Essays of J. V. Cunningham

A “renegade Irish Catholic from the plains of Montana, upper lower class, a onetime scholar in Latin and in the English Renaissance,” J. V. Cunningham is known for formal verse that is clear and concise. A master of the epigram, Cunningham also wrote longer poems in what is often called the Plain Style.

Though Cunningham’s poetic output was small, he also left us a standout, wide-ranging body of essays. As James Matthew Wilson notes in his introduction, “[Cunningham’s] work in verse and prose were two ways of speaking within a single way of life; they were complementary means toward a single end.”

In these essays, Cunningham makes intelligible the “Tradition and Poetic Structure” of our literary inheritance, taking us from the ancient poet “Statius on Sleep” to the “Woe or Wonder” of Shakespeare’s pathos, “Sorting Out,” along the way, the legend of Emily Dickinson. In “Logic and Lyric,” he presents his soberly learned, but renegade argument against the “incautious romantic’s” absolute separation of poetry and philosophy, and with winsome wit he prompts us to consider: “May a lyric be solely or predominantly the exposition of a syllogism? and may the propositions of the lyric, one by one, be of the sort to be found in a logical syllogism?”

The only book that contains the complete collection of Cunningham’s known essays, this Wiseblood edition includes everything contained in Swallow Press’s The Collected Essays of J. V. Cunningham, as well as six additional prose pieces, an expansive introduction from James Matthew Wilson, and an interview with Timothy Steele.

“To follow him on the path, however tentatively and with however many reservations, was to break bread with the modestly great; it was to learn the meaning and practice of poetry in an atmosphere of seriousness and near silence; it was to set out on pilgrimage in search of a more classical, more disciplined, more compelling and intelligent way of living, knowing, and writing in the world.”
—from the Introduction by James Matthew Wilson