The Spirit of Oriental Poetry


Book Description

First Published in 2000. This is Volume IX of fourteen of a series on India- its language and literature. Written in 1926, The Spirit of Oriental Poetry includes the author’s account of his journeys in search of ‘His Footprints’.













Poems of the Late T'ang


Book Description

Classical Chinese poetry reached its pinnacle during the T'ang Dynasty (618-907 A.D.), and the poets of the late T'ang-a period of growing political turmoil and violence-are especially notable for combining strking formal inovation with raw emotional intensity. A. C. Graham’s slim but indispensable anthology of late T’ang poetry begins with Tu Fu, commonly recognized as the greatest Chinese poet of all, whose final poems and sequences lament the pains of exile in images of crystalline strangeness. It continues with the work of six other masters, including the “cold poet” Meng Chiao, who wrote of retreat from civilization to the remoteness of the high mountains; the troubled and haunting Li Ho, who, as Graham writes, cultivated a “wholly personal imagery of ghosts, blood, dying animals, weeping statues, whirlwinds, the will-o'-the-wisp”; and the shimmeringly strange poems of illicit love and Taoist initiation of the enigmatic Li Shang-yin. Offering the largest selection of these poets’ work available in English in a translation that is a classic in its own right, Poems of the Late T’ang also includes Graham’s searching essay “The Translation of Chinese Poetry” as well as helpful notes on each of the poets and on many of the individual poems.




The Spirit Born People


Book Description

These are the lecture notes for addresses I proposed to deliver to the Sikh youth of thePunjab. But as I am placed in the desert away from the towns where they gather, I let these goundelivered. And also because the Sikh youth are running in haste after shadows, turning theirbacks on the Sun of Suns, the Guru. This world of the Guru, the Beautiful, is different and theirworld how different; so to them the values of fiction and fact have been hopelessly interchanged.Still, I hope these addresses will reach them by and by.And the Sikh youth is everywhere, the youth that has the disciple-consciousness, aspiringto love, the Beautiful, which alone is truly good, truly noble, and truly divine. The formBeautiful appearing once rarely in ages, and fascinating the disciple-consciousness and vanishingin the eternal background of the spiritual inner Infinite, is the Guru Beautiful, the Bridegroom;the disciple-consciousness thenceforward restless without that presence or the sense of thatpresence is The Spirit Born People,-or The Brides.




The New Statesman


Book Description




The Songs of Chu


Book Description

Sources show Qu Yuan (?340–278 BCE) was the first person in China to become famous for his poetry, so famous in fact that the Chinese celebrate his life with a national holiday called Poet's Day, or the Dragon Boat Festival. His work, which forms the core of the The Songs of Chu, the second oldest anthology of Chinese poetry, derives its imagery from shamanistic ritual. Its shaman hymns are among the most beautiful and mysterious liturgical works in the world. The religious milieu responsible for their imagery supplies the backdrop for his most famous work, Li sao, which translates shamanic longing for a spirit lover into the yearning for an ideal king that is central to the ancient philosophies of China. Qu Yuan was as important to the development of Chinese literature as Homer was to the development of Western literature. This translation attempts to replicate what the work might have meant to those for whom it was originally intended, rather than settle for what it was made to mean by those who inherited it. It accounts for the new view of the state of Chu that recent discoveries have inspired.




The Dangers of Poetry


Book Description

Poetry has long dominated the cultural landscape of modern Iraq, simultaneously representing the literary pinnacle of high culture and giving voice to the popular discourses of mass culture. As the favored genre of culture expression for religious clerics, nationalist politicians, leftist dissidents, and avant-garde intellectuals, poetry critically shaped the social, political, and cultural debates that consumed the Iraqi public sphere in the twentieth century. The popularity of poetry in modern Iraq, however, made it a dangerous practice that carried serious political consequences and grave risks to dissident poets. The Dangers of Poetry is the first book to narrate the social history of poetry in the modern Middle East. Moving beyond the analysis of poems as literary and intellectual texts, Kevin M. Jones shows how poems functioned as social acts that critically shaped the cultural politics of revolutionary Iraq. He narrates the history of three generations of Iraqi poets who navigated the fraught relationship between culture and politics in pursuit of their own ambitions and agendas. Through this historical analysis of thousands of poems published in newspapers, recited in popular demonstrations, and disseminated in secret whispers, this book reveals the overlooked contribution of these poets to the spirit of rebellion in modern Iraq.