YEATS'S BLESSING ON VON HUEGEL

by Martin Green ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 26, 1967

So get you gone, von Huegel, though with blessings on your head."" Thus Yeats dismissed the gentle Catholic philosopher who believed that faith, in the form of religious dogma, took precedence over art, in the form of literature. Mr. Green probes in these essays the conflict between the spirit of modern literature and religious belief, and he views von Huegel as a religious representative, as a psychological type, and finally as the paradigm of a type of humane sensibility which has gone out of fashion among Such modern Catholic writers as Greene, Bernanos, etc. Subsequent essays extend the problem further in the works of J.F. Powers, Nabokov and Sholokhov. A penultimate essay examines the occidental mythologization of Doctor Zhivago by virtue of which the West, playing God again, creates Pasternak in its own image.... As in Mirror for Anglo-Saxons and Science and the Shabby Curate of Poetry, this explores rather than resolves, but Mr. Green is a stimulating cicerone and his comparatively small, wholly devoted circle of admirers will enjoy these critico-intellectual exercises.

Pub Date: Feb. 26, 1967

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1967

Categories: NONFICTION