Dante and Personal Spiritual Growth

[Ron Price]

REFLECTION AND A COMPLEX MILIEUX

The sonnet led directly to Dante whose epic poetry focusses on personal-spiritual growth, on a spiritual-intellectual vision and is designed for visionary and private readers. They are readers interested in poetry and in the concerns of the poet. They are literary-minded. The poet here is interested in writing for the sake of poetry, or the sake of God.


This is not for performance,1
no visual thrill, story-line, plot,
fixitive of entertainment, no
lovely ladies or action shots: ‘tis
an instrument of reflection, meditation,
going back to 1225 and a contradictory
cultural milieux.2 A literature of the self,
for privacy, silence, total control, stopping
and starting at will, flexibilities, twists, turns,
implications, beyond the hurried attention
of the eye on its fast track, into complexity,
a novel way of handling the ordinary,
deep paradox, the mind revealed for all to see,
its intensity, light and inward speech.

Ron Price
9 November 1996

1This poem deals with the history and purpose of the sonnet which was first written in about 1225 AD. See: Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford UP, NY, 1989, p.22.
2 Sicily is considered part of the home of the sonnet. Sicily was, at the time, the home of Normans, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines, Saracens, Greeks, intellectuals from all over Europe: often seen as contradictory cultures.(ibid.,p.14)

[rachel]

what a fine and deep mind you exhibit. And reading about your life almost plunges one into writing sonnets of you.
Just out of curisousity what do you feel the very heart of Dante is like ?

[Enkidu]

Ah!... Dante, take me to the abysmal depth of damnation to view the future woeful state of my poor soul, writhing in eternal pain for my selfish, prideful, and wrathful ways, much as did Dicken's ghost of Christmas future took the wretched Scrooge to view the misery of his fate lest he change his ways before its too late.

[Ron Price]

It's been over a year since the two responses to my post appeared at "Literature Network Forums." And what a constrasting set of two replies. Thank you for your generous tribute, rachel. The hear of Danteprobably was centered on the Christian revelation, but it is always difficult to know the heart of anyone's heart--with certitude.

Enkidu, it may be that a ore modern cosmology may be more generous in its evaluation of your earthly life. Time will tell; I wish you well--and I wish myself well, too. It's all a bit of a mystery.-Ron Price, Tasmania

[Ron Price]

The traces I bequeath to history, if I bequeath any traces at all, are also---to continue an important theme of the epic tradition--are those of the wandering hero. It is a hero, a wanderer, with many dimensions described in many contexts. It is a journey of redemption to union with God, as it was for Dante. It is a journey of adventure and finding my home, as it was for Odysseus. It is a journey that attempts to embody my vision of the Baha’i world order, as the poet Virgil tried to articulate his vision of Augustus’ order during the crucial years of the establishment of the Roman Empire(29-19 BC). It is a personal epic, a personal journey, an inner journey, within the tradition of William Wordsworth and his Prelude. There are elements of the Miltonian epic here with the foregrounding of the author, his weaknesses and his strengths, in what is par excellence, a theological-religious journey.

And there is the monumental journey of Baha’u’llah over forty years which acts as a metaphorical base for my own journey. The wanderer I draw on is, in other words, a flexible, elastic, figure who allows me to include in my epic poem virtually anything that I want to include in the text.

And so the wanderer that I describe in my epic is a composite. But this wanderer is not in search of the Path; rather, he has found the Path and the wandering takes place on the Path. The wandering through the sea of historical, sociological, literary and other texts, books and articles, etc. is all part of the experience, the context, the definition, of the Path, for this particular journeyman. For the reader will come across many references, many texts, many quotations here. They are laid on a Baha’i-paradigm-map; I am not alone, as Pound was, relying on his own wit and courage with no framework of guidance and meaning within which to sift history’s and experience’s immense chaos into some order. I find that the actual writing of the poem assumes characteristics of the epic journey itself. This was true for Pound, for Dante and, in all likelihood, the mythical Homer.

It may be that my journey on this Path is only half over and that this epic found its initial conceptualization at the mid-point of my Baha’i life. If I live to be ninety-five, my journey within this framework of belief has just passed the half way mark (age 15 to 95, a period of eighty years, with age 55 the half-way point). So I like to think that what I have now, after only eight years of intense writing of poetry, is what Pound had: “a dazzling array of finely wrought fragments straining in their own unique way to achieve order and unity”4 through the deployment and development of this image of the wanderer in its many forms. That is what I like to think. Time will tell, though, if I can sustain and define in precise and dazzling terms the structural, the organizational, principle enunciated above. This structural principle is based on a view of my poetry as: the expression of my experience, my sense, my understanding, in the context of my wandering, my journey and of the concept of the Oneness of Mankind. Can I continue to develop this epic, beyond the start I have given it, to a satisfying conclusion in the years ahead?
__________________________________________________ _______________
FOOTNOTES
__________________________________________________ _______________
1 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.10.
2 Robert Nisbet, Social Change and Social History, 1969. In this book the sociologist Nisbet describes the metaphor of change and its pervasiveness since the age of the Greeks(1200-400 BC).
3 Stephen Sicari, Pound’s Epic Ambition: Dante and the Modern World, State University of New York Press, 1991, p.x.
4 ibid., p. xiii.

Ron Price
28 March 2002
_________________
That's all folks--for now!
PART ONE OF MY SPECIAL EPIC POEM

At the centre of this wondrous epochal shift
is a cultural story of saints, martyrs and
messengers and endless connective tissue
with past and present. Heroic exemplars,
deep in history back to the enlightenment,
say, in Bahrain, the core of the vision
with the force to slowly actualise a reality,
new political and social harmonies
and disharmonies. My own ordering of history
here in its legitimate and beauteous form
with law and design, touchstones of order,
writ large across chaotic and energised
multiplicity, the endless disasters of time,

[kasey183]

what a fine and deep mind you exhibit. And reading about your life almost plunges one into writing sonnets of you.

REFLECTION AND A COMPLEX MILIEUX

The sonnet led directly to Dante whose epic poetry focusses on personal-spiritual growth, on a spiritual-intellectual vision and is designed for visionary and private readers. They are readers interested in poetry and in the concerns of the poet. They are literary-minded. The poet here is interested in writing for the sake of poetry, or the sake of God.


This is not for performance,1
no visual thrill, story-line, plot,
fixitive of entertainment, no
lovely ladies or action shots: ‘tis
an instrument of reflection, meditation,
going back to 1225 and a contradictory
cultural milieux.2 A literature of the self,
for privacy, silence, total control, stopping
and starting at will, flexibilities, twists, turns,
implications, beyond the hurried attention
of the eye on its fast track, into complexity,
a novel way of handling the ordinary,
deep paradox, the mind revealed for all to see,
its intensity, light and inward speech.

Ron Price
9 November 1996

1This poem deals with the history and purpose of the sonnet which was first written in about 1225 AD. See: Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford UP, NY, 1989, p.22.
2 Sicily is considered part of the home of the sonnet. Sicily was, at the time, the home of Normans, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines, Saracens, Greeks, intellectuals from all over Europe: often seen as contradictory cultures.(ibid.,p.14)

[kasey183]

what a fine and deep mind you exhibit. And reading about your life almost plunges one into writing sonnets of you.

REFLECTION AND A COMPLEX MILIEUX

The sonnet led directly to Dante whose epic poetry focusses on personal-spiritual growth, on a spiritual-intellectual vision and is designed for visionary and private readers. They are readers interested in poetry and in the concerns of the poet. They are literary-minded. The poet here is interested in writing for the sake of poetry, or the sake of God.


This is not for performance,1
no visual thrill, story-line, plot,
fixitive of entertainment, no
lovely ladies or action shots: ‘tis
an instrument of reflection, meditation,
going back to 1225 and a contradictory
cultural milieux.2 A literature of the self,
for privacy, silence, total control, stopping
and starting at will, flexibilities, twists, turns,
implications, beyond the hurried attention
of the eye on its fast track, into complexity,
a novel way of handling the ordinary,
deep paradox, the mind revealed for all to see,
its intensity, light and inward speech.

Ron Price
9 November 1996

1This poem deals with the history and purpose of the sonnet which was first written in about 1225 AD. See: Paul Oppenheimer, The Birth of the Modern Mind: Self, Consciousness, and the Invention of the Sonnet, Oxford UP, NY, 1989, p.22.
2 Sicily is considered part of the home of the sonnet. Sicily was, at the time, the home of Normans, Arabs, Jews, Byzantines, Saracens, Greeks, intellectuals from all over Europe: often seen as contradictory cultures.(ibid.,p.14)