Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic "symbol." The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. "They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative," he writes, "with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages." Birth of the Symbol offers a new understanding of the role of poetry in the life of ideas in ancient Greece. Moreover, it demonstrates a connection between the way we understand poetry and the way it was understood by important thinkers in ancient times.

Based on the author's previous publication The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs, this handbook contains an array of symbols and motifs, accompanied by succinct explanations. It provides treatment of the essential Tibetan religious figures, themes and motifs, both secular and religious.

Nearly all of us have studied poetry and been taught to look for the symbolic as well as literal meaning of the text. Is this the way the ancients saw poetry? In Birth of the Symbol, Peter Struck explores the ancient Greek literary critics and theorists who invented the idea of the poetic "symbol." The book notes that Aristotle and his followers did not discuss the use of poetic symbolism. Rather, a different group of Greek thinkers--the allegorists--were the first to develop the notion. Struck extensively revisits the work of the great allegorists, which has been underappreciated. He links their interest in symbolism to the importance of divination and magic in ancient times, and he demonstrates how important symbolism became when they thought about religion and philosophy. "They see the whole of great poetic language as deeply figurative," he writes, "with the potential always, even in the most mundane details, to be freighted with hidden messages." Birth of the Symbol offers a new understanding of the role of poetry in the life of ideas in ancient Greece. Moreover, it demonstrates a connection between the way we understand poetry and the way it was understood by important thinkers in ancient times.

For the past four or five years much of my thinking has centered up on the relationship of symbolic forms to philosophic imagination and interpretation. As one whose own philosophic speculations began at. the end of a cultural epoch under methodologies dominated either by neo-Kantianism or schools of logical empiricism the symbol as a prod uct of a cultural imagination has been diminished; it has been neces sary for those who wanted to preserve the symbol to find appropriate philosophical methodologies to do so. In the following chapters we shall attempt to show, through a consideration of a series of recent interpretations of the symbol, as well as through constructive argu ment, that the symbol ought to be considered as a linguistic form in the sense that it constitutes a special language with its own rubrics and properties. There are two special considerations to be taken ac count of in this argument; first, the definition of the symbol, and sec ond, the interpretation of the symbol. Although we shall refrain from defining the symbol explicitly at this point let it suffice to state that our definition of the symbol is more aesthetic than logical (in the technical sense of formal logic ), more cultural than individual, more imaginative than scientific. The symbol in our view is somewhere at the center of culture, the well-spring which testifies to the human imagination in its poetic, psychic, religious, social and political forms.

This book by Kevin Conner undertakes to interpret signs, symbols, and types that he discovers beneath the surface in biblical text.

The author examines the meaning and imprecisions of 'symbol' in this interdisciplinary study of nineteenth-century writers.

There have been many histories of Christian art and architecture but none written be a theologian such as Kevin Seasoltz. Following a chapter on culture as the context for theology, liturgy, and art, Seasoltz surveys developments from the early church up through the conventional artistic styles and periods. Comprehensive, illuminating, ecumenical.