Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment

Halpern, Daniel

ISBN 10: 0060182407 / ISBN 13: 9780060182403

Published by Harpercollins (edition ), 1994

It's a preowned item in good condition and includes all the pages. It may have some general signs of wear and tear, such as markings, highlighting, slight damage to the cover, minimal wear to the binding, etc., but they will not affect the overall reading experience. Seller Inventory # 0060182407-11-1

Synopsis:

Since the beginning of time, poets have been absorbed by the quest for signs that our lives have greater spiritual significance than the simple sum of our labors on earth. The deceptive simplicity of the Sufi poet Rumi's musings, Romantic poet William Blake's riveting map of heaven and hell, the self-destructive Arthur Rimbaud's thirst for the extremes of human experience, and the sometimes ecstatic, often heartrending Celtic vision of William Butler Yeats, among others, attest to this enduring poetic search.
In Holy Fire, editor Daniel Halpern has collected the work of nine poets whose writing has shaped our modern view of the sacred. William Blake, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Allen Ginsberg are included here, as well as lesser-known but equally important writers, such as Jelaluddin Rumi, the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lalla, and the sixteenth-century Hindu mystic Mirabai.

Reviews: The growing American preoccupation with spirituality could seek refinement and identity from this anthology compiled by Halpern (The American Poetry Anthology). Defining his criteria of selection more as anomalous power of voice and vision than anything representative, he assembles a powerful gallery. (And excludes some writers-Whitman, Dickinson, et al.-who might otherwise be at home with his theme.) Readers can wander from Rumi's (1207-1273) playfully moralistic "Dervish at the Door," a poem of story and dialogue, to Rimbaud's "perilous path" in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," onward and inward to Rilke's Duino Elegies: "Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels'/ hierarchies?," and finally encounter the "angelheaded hipsters" of Allen Ginsberg's Howl. The many textures of spiritual experience seem to sway and deepen with a reader's passage. The translators include Robert Bly, Jane Hirshfield and Stephen Mitchell.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If this were an anthology with literary history instead of packaging as its concern, one might wonder how it is possible to get from Rumi, Lalla, and Mirabai-three poets from Eastern, oral traditions-to Blake, Rimbaud, and Rilke and to wind up with Yeats, Hart Crane, and Allen Ginsberg. Each poet has a similar "texture," according to editor and well-known poet Halpern (forget about issues of translation), and has "reached," rather vaguely, "into...the holy fire of the soul, has been baptized by fire and has emerged, via the poem." While these editorial principles are shaky at best, the volume may be of some interest to readers who would be drawn to poetry for its "visionary" (read also "spiritual" or "occult") qualities. It is therefore recommended for merchandising public libraries without reserves in this area.
Steven R. Ellis, Brooklyn P.L.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the ...
Publisher: Harpercollins (edition )
Publication Date: 1994
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: Good