NOURISHING VISIONS
Poets live today in the midst of a current of ideas animating and nourishing their creative power in the highest degree. Such was also the Greece of Pindar and Sophocles and the England of Shakespeare. This state of affairs is an important, a quickening, a sustaining atmosphere, perhaps the true, basis for the creative power’s exercise. Such an exercise, such an activity, such a gift, confers an especial type of happiness and aliveness. An immense body of analysis and interpretation exists; a source, a resource for a great movement of feeling such that a profound body of thought can be brought to bear upon the discipline of poetry. We are now in our promised land. We entered it insensibly, hardly appreciating that we had, hardly knowing what to do with it, now quite overwhelmed by its burgeoning nature.
I have access to some 30 Christian academic journals-all free and filled with analyses of the Bible and the Christian tradition and they are all at my finger tips thanks to Google. -Ron Price with thanks to Matthew Arnold, Lectures and Essays in Criticism, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1973(1962), pp.258-285.
There’s been a burgeoning all my days
with its especial type of happiness,
a retiring into my soul, with such thoughts
and their tranquillity, a retreat, a renewal,
herein is my inner life, a watching over myself,
a trying to get the springs of action right,
a gentleness, a sweetness, a delicate
and tender sentiment, less than joy,
more than resignation, all part of my life
as a human being in school and out,
with more books than you can shake
a stick at: with Toynbee, the historian-
poet1 and his Bible rhythms
and Gibbonian balances,
his archaeology, sociology,
philosophy and theology,
his huge poem in prose
with his vision of global
Unity, one all-meaning
Idea for humankind.
1 I started reading Toynbee’s A Study of History in late 1964 or early 1965. A review of his work in The Journal of the History of Ideas(1955) by Prof E. Fiess refers to Toynbee as a poet. His work was certainly animating and nourishing, a fertile ground for my poetic development twenty to thirty years later, filled with Christian allusions, Biblical references, an education in itself.
Ron Price
December 2005
(original: 4/8/00)