The Poetics of Ecstasy: Varieties of Ekstasis from Sappho to Borges. By Willis Barnstone. Published by Holmes & Meier in 1983.
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The Poetics of Ecstasy proposes a new category of literary analysis- ecstasy in its various manifestations, religious and secular. In beautiful prose, at once graceful and erudite, Willis Barnstone reveals that ecstasy is a significant element in the voice of many major authors. In some cases, indeed, it offers a key to their work. The Poetics of Ecstasy examines writers who experience ecstasy by moving from our ordinary state of enstasis (standing in oneself) to the extraordinary state of exstasis (standing elsewhere) in which the unknown is experienced. Barnstone describes the mystical transport of Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa, Luis de Leon, and Ramon Llull; the negative ecstasy of love in Sappho; the ecstasy of fury in Lope de Vega and Edgar Lee Masters. He also discusses the flash of gnosis in Constantine Cavafy's ecstasy of memory and Jorge Luis Borges's movement out of blindness to the ecstasy of the other. He explains the action of Melville's Billy Budd and Camus's Meursault through criminal ecstasy and sees the ecstasy of movement as an essential element in Dante's journey in the Commedia. In poets as diverse as Thomas Traherne, Jorge Guillen, Pablo Neruda, and Mao Tse-tung he describes a secular ecstasy of jubilance- Traherne's and Guillen's transports in to the firmament, Neruda's communion with lower beasts, and Mao's often banal ecstasy of triumph. A long introduction, full of original insights, traces of the religious and philosophical uses of ecstasy from the pre-Socratics through Eliot's Four Quartets.

Lucid and passionate, studded with poems (many translated by Barnstone himself), this book provides a key to the work of a great range of writers, establishes a new dimension for literary criticism and history, and will be a delight to the specialist as well as the general reader.