Читать книгу Thomas Merton's Poetics of Self-Dissolution онлайн
40 страница из 65
39 James York Glimm, “Thomas Merton’s Last Poem: The Geography of Lograire,” Renascence 26 (1974), pp. 93-95.
40 Anthony Padovano, The Human Journey: Thomas Merton: Symbol of a Century (New York: Image Books, 1984), p. 136.
41 See Michael Higgins, “Merton and the Real Poets: Paradise Rebugged,” The Merton Annual, Vol. 3 (1990), p. 175; Paul Pearson, “The Geography of Lograire: Thomas Merton’s Final Prophetic Vision,” in Thomas Merton: Poet, Monk, Prophet (Great Britain: Three Peaks Press, 1998), pp. 88-89.
42 The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, op.cit., p. 123.
Chapter 2
“O Sweet Escape! O Smiling Flight!”
Commentaries on a Selection of Poems by Thomas Merton1
If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.
Matthew 16:24-25
Most of Thomas Merton’s poems represent what could be called “poetics of dissolution.” They are glimpses which accurately convey his progressive abandonment of the “world” and of his own “self,” which were – as we will see — inseparable. Far from leading to a nihilist pessimism, his criticism of the forms of submission to reality, and his attack on individual identities throughout his work, constitute an authentic source of strength, inspiration, and joy and they lend themselves to poignant reflections, which I would like to share with the reader.