Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic PDF Author: Jerome Meckier
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643901011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic

Aldous Huxley, from Poet to Mystic PDF Author: Jerome Meckier
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643901011
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 393

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Book Description
Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)

Aldous Huxley

Aldous Huxley PDF Author: Milton Birnbaum
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412816742
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 252

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Book Description
In the moral vacuum and world of shifting values following World War I, Aldous Huxley was both a sensitive reflector and an articulate catalyst. This work provides a highly illuminating analysis of Huxley's evolution from skeptic to mystic. As Milton Birnbaum shows, in a perceptive interpretation of Huxley's poetry, fiction, essays and biographies--what evolved in Huxley's moral and intellectual pilgrimage was not so much a change in direction as a shift in emphasis. Even in the sardonic Huxley of the 1920s and 1930s, there is a moral concern. In the later Huxley, there are traces of the satirical skepticism which delighted his readers in the decades preceding World War II. A man of letters, a keen observer, seeker of new ways while profoundly knowledgeable in the truths of ancient wisdom, Huxley tried to achieve a symbiotic synthesis of the best of all worlds. In clarifying and interpreting Huxley's intellectual, moral, and philosophical development, Birnbaum touches upon all the subjects that came under the scrutiny of a singularly encyclopedic mind. This book is of great worth to those interested both in Huxley the brilliant satirist and in Huxley the seeker of salvation. In his search, Huxley typified the modern quest for values. Milton Birnbaum's study is an invaluable guide in that journey. His new introduction takes account of research and analysis of Huxley that has occurred since this book's original publication. Milton Birnbaum is the retired Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and professor of English at American International College. He has contributed articles on English and American literature to many journals and has published satiric articles in The Chronicle of Higher Education under the logo of "Higher Education, Eh?'"

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell

The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell PDF Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781544816227
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Two great classics come to life in one of the most loved books in American History. Remastered to include Illustrated exercises, a biography of Aldous Huxley, and including the full essay of Heaven and Hell, and The Doors to Perception, this book is a great gift to those who are unfamiliar with his work, or may have forgotten about Huxley's famous contemplations of life and death. - ZKBS(c) All Rights Reserved.

Aldous Huxley, Representative Man

Aldous Huxley, Representative Man PDF Author: James Hull
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3825876632
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 623

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Book Description
This psychological reading of Huxley's oeuvre as a whole traces Huxley's self-transformation in his books and aims to do justice to the artist and the person who was Aldous Huxley. It is safe to regard as basic to his entire work the unfolding of the conflict we find so clearly delineated in his early short story "Farcical History of Richard Greenow" (Limbo, 1920), with Pearl Bellairs representing the emotional tradition that threatens the synthetic philosopher. Huxley's own story is plainly visible even in Limbo and Crome Yellow (1921), but it is in Antic Hay (1923) that the pattern of the future assumes a solid foundation. There we encounter in full force the tensions that follow him throughout his life: on the one hand an extreme of sensuality and on the other a longing for the "chaste pleasures," for a quiet and mystical worid completely different from that in which he found himself. The question of the relations between body and mind as well as the mystery of human consciousness haunt him to the very last, but after his mid-life crisis, depicted in Eyeless in Gaza (1936), a strong faith in the reality of a spiritual world is obvions. In the end he even manages to reinstate the body in his scheme of things. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 5)

The Perennial Philosophy

The Perennial Philosophy PDF Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061893315
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 356

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Book Description
An inspired gathering of religious writings that reveals the "divine reality" common to all faiths, collected by Aldous Huxley "The Perennial Philosophy," Aldous Huxley writes, "may be found among the traditional lore of peoples in every region of the world, and in its fully developed forms it has a place in every one of the higher religions." With great wit and stunning intellect—drawing on a diverse array of faiths, including Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Christian mysticism, and Islam—Huxley examines the spiritual beliefs of various religious traditions and explains how they are united by a common human yearning to experience the divine. The Perennial Philosophy includes selections from Meister Eckhart, Rumi, and Lao Tzu, as well as the Bhagavad Gita, Tibetan Book of the Dead, Diamond Sutra, and Upanishads, among many others.

Those Barren Leaves

Those Barren Leaves PDF Author: Aldous Huxley
Publisher: BoD - Books on Demand
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description
We rely on your support to help us keep producing beautiful, free, and unrestricted editions of literature for the digital age. Will you support our efforts with a donation? Mrs. Aldwinkle, an English aristocrat of a certain age, has purchased a mansion in the Italian countryside. She wishes to bring a salon of intellectual luminaries into her orbit, and to that end she invites a strange cast of characters to spend time with her in her palazzo: Irene, her young niece; Ms. Thriplow, a governess-turned-novelist; Mr. Calamy, a handsome young man of great privilege and even greater ennui; Mr. Cardan, a worldly gentleman whose main talent seems to be the enjoyment of life; Hovenden, a young motorcar-obsessed lord with a speech impediment; and Mr. Falx, a socialist leader. To this unlikely cast is soon added Mr. Chelifer, an author with an especially florid, overwrought style that is wasted on his day job as editor of The Rabbit Fancier’s Gazette, and the Elvers, a scheming brother who is the guardian of his mentally-challenged sister. As this unlikely group mingles, they discuss a great many grand topics: love, art, language, life, culture. Yet very early on the reader comes to realize that behind the pompousness of their elaborate discussions lies nothing but vacuity—these characters are a satire of the self-important intellectuals of Huxley’s era. His skewering of their intellectual barrenness continues as the group moves on to a trip around the surrounding country, in a satire of the Grand Tour tradition. The party brings their English snobbery out in full force as they traipse around Rome, sure of nothing else except in their belief that Italy is culturally superior simply because it’s Italy. As the vacation winds down, we’re left with a biting lampoon of the elites who suppose themselves to be at the height of art and culture—the kinds of personalities that arise in every generation, sure of their own greatness but unable to actually contribute anything to the world of art and culture that they feel is so important.

Psychedelic Prophets

Psychedelic Prophets PDF Author: Cynthia Carson Bisbee
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
ISBN: 0773556036
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 729

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Book Description
Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was the author of nearly fifty books and numerous essays, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World. Humphry Osmond (1917–2004) was a British-trained psychiatrist interested in the biological nature of mental illness and the potential for psychedelic drugs to treat psychoses, especially schizophrenia. In 1953, Huxley sent an appreciative note to Osmond about an article he and a colleague had published on their experiments with mescaline, which inspired an initial meeting and decade-long correspondence. This critical edition provides the complete Huxley-Osmond correspondence, chronicling an exchange between two brilliant thinkers who explored such subjects as psychedelics, the visionary experience, the nature of mind, human potentialities, schizophrenia, death and dying, Indigenous rituals and consciousness, socialism, capitalism, totalitarianism, power and authority, and human evolution. There are references to mutual friends, colleagues, and eminent figures of the day, as well as details about both men's personal lives. The letters bear witness to the development of mind-altering drugs aimed at discovering the mechanisms of mental illness and eventually its treatment. A detailed introduction situates the letters in their historical, social, and literary context, explores how Huxley and Osmond first coined the term "psychedelic," contextualizes their work in mid-century psychiatry, and reflects on their legacy as contributors to the science of mind-altering substances. Psychedelic Prophets is an extraordinary record of a full correspondence between two leading minds and a testament to friendship, intellectualism, empathy, and tolerance. The fact that these sentiments emerge so clearly from the letters, at a historical moment best known for polarizing ideological conflict, threats of nuclear war, and the rise of post-modernism, reveals much about the personalities of the authors and the persistence of these themes today.

Aldous Huxley Annual. Volume 12/13 (2012/2013)

Aldous Huxley Annual. Volume 12/13 (2012/2013) PDF Author: Bernfried Nugel
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN: 3643905874
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 366

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Book Description
Volume 12/13 of the Aldous Huxley Annual begins with a discussion of a lecture Huxley gave in Italian, an appraisal of his never-completed project of a novel on Catherine of Siena, and his recently re-discovered drawings for "Leda." Further critical articles on particular aspects of Huxley's work follow, together with the second Peter Edgerly Firchow Memorial Prize Essay by Hisashi Ozawa of King's College London. A painting by Carolyn Mary Kleefeld ushers in the second part of the book, which contains a selection of papers from the Oxford Symposium held in 2013. (Series: Aldous Huxley Annual - Vol. 12/13) [Subject: Literary Criticism, Art]

Connotations

Connotations PDF Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : English language
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description


Travels on the Road to America

Travels on the Road to America PDF Author: Kenneth C. Gardner Jr.
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1491772840
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Chris Cockburn, the main character in the novel The Song Is Ended, is eight years older. He buys a 1970 Honda CB750, Candy Ruby Red, and sets off on a trip from North Dakota to New Orleans and back. He meets bikers, waitresses, gas station attendants, preachers, pimps, prostitutes and policemen, the common people of America, as well seeing some places significant in the cultural history of the United States. More importantly, he discovers a theme over one hundred and thirty years old that, if adopted, could enhance the moral fiber of American life.