The Wayward Thomist: A Critical Introduction to John Martin Finlay

John Martin Finlay was a poet and essayist critically acclaimed but little known during his short life. A Catholic convert but also an early victim of the AIDS virus, he wrote his greatest work while under a death sentence, struggling to cultivate an intellect modeled after his masters, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In this first-ever full-length study of Finlay’s life and work, James Matthew Wilson guides us through the author's career as scholar and poet to introduce us to Finlay’s compelling mind, profound influences, and rough-hewn masterpieces. We meet in these pages a Southern Agrarian, austere classicist, and wayward Thomist—a minor poet of major ambitions whom every American should read.

"John Martin Finlay, one of the most fascinating literary talents of the Eighties, has remained criminally overlooked both by scholarship and the public—partly due to tragic personal circumstances, partly due to his determination to put spiritual rigor before vapid fashionability. This volume is a noble and able effort to fill in this conspicuous chink in the canon. To do justice to the theologically fierce verse and criticism of Finlay requires not only a sensitivity to poetic craftsmanship, but expertise across many subjects: Wintersian criticism, Catholic doctrine, Thomism, Gnosticism, Platonism, Southern Literature, and Western intellectual history—whose erudition but James Matthew Wilson’s could rise to this challenge? And rise Wilson does, providing an incisive, painstakingly fair assessment of the life and work of this poète maudit who heroically strove to grasp a wholesome, hypostatic vision of the world, and thereby proved himself an exemplar for the progress of the modern soul." —Elijah Blumov, host of Versecraft