"Anam Cara is a rare synthesis of philosophy, poetry, and spirituality. This work will have a powerful and life-transforming experience for those who read it." —Deepak Chopra John O'Donohue, poet, philosopher, and scholar, guides you through the spiritual landscape of the Irish imagination. In Anam Cara, Gaelic for "soul friend," the ancient teachings, stories, and blessings of Celtic wisdom provide such profound insights on the universal themes of friendship, solitude, love, and death as: Light is generous The human heart is never completely born Love as ancient recognition The body is the angel of the soul Solitude is luminous Beauty likes neglected places The passionate heart never ages To be natural is to be holy Silence is the sister of the divine Death as an invitation to freedom

A personal friend of T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, Christopher Fry, and C.S. Lewis, to mention only a few, Charles Walter Stansby Williams (1886-1945) was a self-educated, somewhat scholarly, rather ugly-faced Londoner with a Cockney accent. As a married man with the usual economic difficulties that disturb family life, he was forced to supplement his income as an editor for Oxford University Press by lecturing, tutoring, and writing. In a comparatively short life time he produced more than fifty works, several published posthumously, plus a considerable number of articles, book reviews, and verses for British and Irish periodicals. The annotated bibliography at the end of this study gives a general indication of the scope and value of this literary output. Since the death of Charles Williams, something like a cult has grown up about his name, not only in Anglican literary circles in England but also in various university and church circles in America. The reasons for this are not always obvious, but one fact appears to be certain: the cult is usually concerned with Williams, the philosopher, or Williams, the theologian, or Williams, the novelist. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers, and C.S. Lewis, for example, have discussed briefly one or all three of these facets of Williams' literary personality, and the latter two have acknowledged a certain literary indebtedness to him. As yet, however, few members of the cult recognize Williams as a dramatist, poet, literary critic and theorist, historian and biographer, and editor. Moreover, with the exception of C.S. Lewis, no member of the cult has attempted a scholarly investigation of any aspect of Williams' thought. The present study is a critical exploration of one of these avenues of thought: Williams' concept of the nature of poetry. The conclusion of this study indicates that the members of the cult should seriously consider him as a literary critic and theorist. At a time when modern criticism still exhibits the confusion inherited from its romantic background, it is no mean achievement for Williams to separate the art of poetry from the other intellectual disciplines and to claim that "poetry is a thing sui generis.--p. vii.

Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes presents an account of “the Poets’ Secret,” the quite belated, historically recent, discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text—thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually. Inferential perception of the implicit sense produced logically and linguistically—by enthymemes, implicatures, and other intratextual features, as well as intertextual ones—can be indispensable for readers’ comprehension of literary as well as other texts, especially their difficult passages. Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes addresses these elusive matters as they have historically been posed by Thomas Gray’s Pindaric odes of 1757, and mainly the first of them, “The Progress of Poesy,” a poem that readers have more or less knowledgeably struggled to understand from the outset. The process of disclosing that ode’s sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray’s largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke.

'The Theology of Romantic Love' is the first comprehensive presentation of the thought of one of the most gifted novelists and original theologians of the twentieth century. Drawing together the recurrent themes and proving insights scattered through his many books, Mrs. Shideler sets forth with clarity and understanding Williams' versatile use of imagery, his key ideas, his revaluation of basic Christian doctrines, and his approach to personal and social ethics. Readers will find in these pages a vivid new appreciation of the experience of love in the life of faith.

After an opening chapter that examines the nature of poetry itself and analyzes its effect upon the reader, the author, in The English Poetic Mind, moves on to his main purpose, which is to try to reveal the source of the drive to creation in three of the greatest English poets: William Shakespeare, John Milton, and William Wordsworth. In each he identifies a particular kind of crisis that is the origin of the poetic impulse. In the light of these discoveries he addresses the achievements of several lesser poets and concludes with a chapter that, in a more general way, tentatively offers a vision of the paths poetry might take in the future.