Results by title
4 books match the query 'Wilson, Eric G.'
How to Make a Soul
The Wisdom of John KeatsEric G. Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2015
In this innovative hybrid of biography, memoir, and criticism, Eric G. Wilson describes how John Keats gave him solace during a bout of mental illness in spring 2012. While on a tour of the principal sites in Keats’s life—ranging from his London medical school to the small room in Rome where he died—Wilson discovered analogies between the poet’s troubles and his own. He was most struck by Keats’s enlivening vision of the soul.
For Keats, we don’t possess but rather make a soul. We do this by imaginatively transforming our suffering into empathy toward humans and nature alike. Tracking this idea in Keats’s tumultuous yet exhilarating life and work, Wilson struggles to envision his depression anew, desperate to overcome the apathy alienating him from his family.
How to Make a Soul offers fresh perspectives on Keats’s pragmatism, irony, comedy, ethics, and aesthetics, but is above all a lyrical celebration of those galvanizing instances when life springs into art.
I Contain Multitudes
A New Life of Walt WhitmanEric G. Wilson
University of Chicago Press, 2027
Lively and entertaining, this is the first comprehensive biography of Walt Whitman in more than twenty-five years, drawing on significant new discoveries and scholarship.
Walt Whitman is not only one of the most influential and popular poets in American history but also a symbol of American character and independence, as important to our nation’s identity as Abraham Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe, or Louis Armstrong. While his poetry and exuberant style still inspire writers today, our understanding of his life is due for an update. It has been over a quarter of a century since the last full-length biography of Whitman, and in that time several works by Whitman have been rediscovered—including a novel and a men’s health manual—that put Whitman in a new light. In I Contain Multitudes, Eric G. Wilson draws on these discoveries to give us a fresh life of Whitman, one that reveals him to be more playful, flexible, and pragmatic than we had known.
Whitman emerges here as an artist adept in almost every literary genre. Across these varied writings, he fashioned a comedic vision based on the multifariousness of the cosmos. In his life as well, he created a wide range of personae. Like an experienced actor, Whitman had many roles and selves at the ready: the urban dandy, the Broadway bohemian, the humble Civil War nurse. Wilson’s portrait casts well-studied Whitman traits in a new light: his radical egalitarianism, he shows, was suffused with humor—to be a good citizen meant not taking yourself too seriously—and his famous powers of empathy resulted in darkly funny challenges to oppressive hierarchies.
Wilson tells Whitman’s life in dozens of brief, vivid segments, an innovative approach that reflects Whitman’s own existential and literary brio. Presenting the multitudinous Whitman with both stylistic gusto and scholarly rigor, I Contain Multitudes reads as much like a novel as the authoritative biography it is.
My Business Is to Create
Blake's Infinite WritingEric G. Wilson
University of Iowa Press, 2011
p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; }
For William Blake, living is creating, conforming is death, and “the imagination . . . is the Human Existence itself.” But why are imagination and creation—so vital for Blake—essential for becoming human? And what is imagination? What is creation? How do we create? Blake had answers for these questions, both in word and in deed, answers that serve as potent teachings for aspiring writers and accomplished ones alike. Eric G. Wilson’s My Business Is to Create emulates Blake, presenting the great figure’s theory of creativity as well as the practices it implies.
In both his life and his art, Blake provided a powerful example of creativity at any cost—in the face of misunderstanding, neglect, loneliness, poverty, even accusations of insanity. Just as Los cries out in Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, “I must Create a System, or be enslav'd by another Man's; / I will not Reason and Compare: my business is to Create,” generations of writers and artists as diverse as John Ruskin, William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Philip K. Dick, songwriter Patti Smith, the avant-garde filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, and the underground comic-book artist R. Crumb have taken Blake’s creed as inspiration.
Unwilling to cede his vision, Blake did more than simply produce iconoclastic poems and paintings; he also cleared a path toward spiritual and ethical enlightenment. To fashion powerful art is to realize the God within and thus to feel connected with enduring vitality and abundant generosity. This is Blake’s everlasting gospel, distilled here in an artist’s handbook of interest to scholars, writing teachers, and those who have made writing their way of life. My Business Is to Create is indispensable for all serious artists who want to transform their lives into art and make their art more alive.
The Mercy of Eternity
A Memoir of Depression and GraceEric G. Wilson
Northwestern University Press, 2010
As a bright student-athlete on his way to West Point, Eric Wilson seemed to be well on the way to a fulfilling life. Yet he was haunted by overwhelming feelings of his deep insignificance. As he grew older, the traditional means of fulfillment—marriage and professional success—did nothing to assuage the descents into darkness and destructive behavior. Therapy and medication have offered some relief, but the birth of his daughter ultimately forces his hand. In some ways, the answer has been in front of him the whole time, for English professor Wilson finds in the literature of Coleridge, Blake, and others the lessons that depression might teach. When he comes upon “negative theology”—the school of thought that finds God in the “dark night of the soul”—Wilson discovers the framework for a radical call to forgive depression.
Only by forgiving this capricious, impersonal force is Wilson able to find the grace to move beyond the cycles of destructive self-absorption.Wilson admits that he continues to struggle, but in facing his depression instead of trying to escape it, he finds wisdom and grace.
Beautifully and accessibly written, The Mercy of Eternity is a brief yet profound meditation on the largest question of life.