front cover of Catholic Modernism and the Irish
Catholic Modernism and the Irish "Avant-Garde
" The Achievement of Brian Coffey, Denis Devlin, and Thomas MacGreevey
James Matthew Wilson
Catholic University of America Press, 2023
This study constitutes the first-ever definitive account of the life and work of Irish modernist poets Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey, and Denis Devlin. Apprenticed to the likes of W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, all three writers worked at the center of modernist letters in England, France, and the United States, but did so from a distinctive perspective. All three writers wrote with a deep commitment to the intellectual life of Catholicism and saw the new movement in the arts as making possible for the first time a rich sacramental expression of the divine beauty in aesthetic form. MacGreevy spent his life trying to voice the Augustinian vision he found in The City of God. Coffey, a student of neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain, married scholastic thought and a densely wrought poetics to give form and solution to the alienation of modern life. Devlin contemplated the world with the eyes of Montaigne and the heart of Pascal as he searched for a poetry that could realize the divine presence in the experience of the modern person. Taken together, MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin exemplify the modern Catholic intellectual seeking to engage the modern world on its own terms while drawing the age toward fulfillment within the mystery and splendor of the Church. They stand apart from their Irish contemporaries for their religious seriousness and cosmopolitan openness of European modernism. They lay bare the theological potencies of modern art and do so with a sophistication and insight distinctive to themselves. Although MacGreevy, Coffey, and Devlin have received considerable critical attention in the past, this is the first book to study their work comprehensively, from MacGreevy’s early poems and essays on Joyce and Eliot to Coffey’s essays in the neo-scholastic philosophy of science, and on to Devlin’s late poetic attempts to realize Dante’s divine vision in a Europe shattered by war and modern doubt.
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front cover of Muzzled Oxen
Muzzled Oxen
Reaping Cotton and Sowing Hope in 1920s Arkansas
Genevieve Grant Sadler
Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, 2014
In the 1920s Genevieve Sadler left her home in California for what she thought would be a short visit to the Arkansas farm where her husband grew up. The visit lasted seven years, and Sadler’s life was changed forever in the time she spent among the cotton farms near Dardanelle in Yell County, Arkansas, on the eve of the Great Depression. Based on her long and detailed letters to her mother, she wrote this engaging memoir with its rich portrait of a small town and its inhabitants, many of whom were poor cotton farmers working on shares.
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