God and the Imagination

Scholarly yet passionate, learned yet accessible, these memoirs, interpretations, and generous appraisals bring to the study of contemporary poetry a perfect conjoining of sympathy, mastery, inventiveness, and a deeply felt religious faith. God and the Imagination is a brilliant, loving, radiant book.

* author of A Stay Against Confusion *

Mariani comes on as a modern working class Whitman who has not forgotten his origins. He writes a redemptive and humane criticism that attempts to preserve rather than to deconstruct or destroy. In Mariani's sympathy for the lives that have touched his, we see how this biographer of poets has extended that sympathy to his great subjects: William Carlos Williams, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. To read Mariani is to recognize a genuine love for poets and poetry is possible without tendentiousness or a theoretical agenda. Would that every poet writing in America today had an advocate as generous.

Mariani is emotionally present, intellectually alive, and spiritually alert in this splendid collection of essays that is animated by deep personal vision and unified by an abiding faith in the work of poetry. 'Who touches this,' as Whitman says, 'touches a man,' and the result here is an exhilarating book of encounters and revelations.

The title is brave: God and the Imagination. The book is even braver, for in twenty-two essays the prizewinning biographer and poet paul Mariani probes himself, modern American poetry and the poetic imagination. . . .[T]his is the book of a poet, stylist and wordlover who is also a clear thinker, an acute stylist and a compelling enthusiast.