The Poetry of Compassion

Compassion, a middle-English derivation from the Latin compati (to suffer with), has in our confusing and tumultuous times become a major academic discipline. Professor Patrick Pietroni brings together his work as the director of the Darwin International Institute for the Study of Compassion and his love of poetry to outline how the concept of compassion can emerge as a force for good in our conflicted world.

When examining compassion from a religious perspective, one finds that all of the major world religions and humanistic organizations find compassion among the highest human virtues, and that they describe this aspect of the human species in remarkably similar ways, which we now recognize throughout the world as the Golden Rule.

This slender volume offers the reader a poetic entrance into or reintroduction to the recognition and practice of compassion on all levels: to humans, to the largest or smallest of the animal kingdom, and to our beloved Earth. The poets collected here include Warsan Shire, William Wordsworth, Mary Oliver, Stanley Cooper, and Maya Angelou, among others.