| 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. |
