Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн

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The poet meditates, sings, suffers and re-creates the world from his paradisus claustralis, from the pristine and ineffable void of his innermost ground of being. After many years of inner conflict between his two apparently contradictory vocations – the monastic and the artistic – he finally renders a truly significant poetry which is a faithful expression of his spiritual evolution from solitude to solidarity, from contemptus mundi to universal love.

During the 40s, Merton published several books of poems; apart from the already mentioned Early Poems, he also wrote Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), Figures for an Apocalypse (1947) or The Tears of the Blind Lions (1949). Most of them show the clear division he made between the sacred and the profane world, between silence and writing, between the religious and the aesthetic, between contemplation and action. His early poems trace back his years as student in Oakham School (England) and his stay at Greenwich Village. Together with others composed later on, they reflect the poet’s critical attitude against the shadows and false values prevailing in Western culture: