RonPrice
07-16-2006, 01:47 PM
The Hidden Words is a "dynamic spiritual leven cast into the life of the world for the reorientation of the minds of men, the edification of their souls and the rectification of their conduct." It was revealed just as the institution of literary criticism, in Anglo-American culture, was being launched. In 1857, a few months before this revelation, a revelation which was part of the most rapid and extensive outpouring in the entire Adamic cycle, Matthew Arnold, the first non-cleric, was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford.
-Ron Price with thanks to Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, USA, 1944, p.140; and Frank D. McConnell, "Will Deconstruction be the Death of Literature?", WQ Winter, 1990, p.103....a heterodox and seemingly neglibible offshoot of the Shaykhi school....-Shoghi Effendi, op.cit., p.xii....consider their opposition and persecution as the caprice of children and do not igve any importance to whatever they do...-‘Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West Vol.1 No.10, pp.1-2.
You1 saw the Messiah as a fully*
energetic, fully visionary poet,
someone mankind would have
to turn to to interpret life for us,
to console us, to sustain us-but
not the Messiah who had just then
descended from the Realm of Glory2,
not a heterodox and seemingly negligible
religious institution. Did you think fine words
and finer sentiments could do it, some secular
humanism and reformed Christianity could bring
about the massive influx of Truth that the world
needed? The world of literature-and its critics-went
merrily down the highway of the secular critic-priest
to personal civilization, to democratic culture and then
to deconstruction and the unity of all being in language:
literature and criticism matter---heterodoxy---covenant
breaking---matter because they clarify, define with greater
precision, the Source, the Orthodox, for That is not on trial.
Ron Price
22 December 1997
1 Matthew Arnold heir of the romantic vision and a founder of modern criticism in literature.
2 Baha’u’llah revealed His "Hidden Words" in 1958 just after Arnold was appointed to his professorship and began to develop a theology in search of objects of worship, to propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
*A vahid(from the Persian language, meaning ‘unity’) is a poetic form I use from time to time. It consists of 19 lines of poetry and allows more amplitude than the 14 line sonnet. It is not a poetic form I have found elsewhere.
-Ron Price with thanks to Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, USA, 1944, p.140; and Frank D. McConnell, "Will Deconstruction be the Death of Literature?", WQ Winter, 1990, p.103....a heterodox and seemingly neglibible offshoot of the Shaykhi school....-Shoghi Effendi, op.cit., p.xii....consider their opposition and persecution as the caprice of children and do not igve any importance to whatever they do...-‘Abdu’l-Baha, Star of the West Vol.1 No.10, pp.1-2.
You1 saw the Messiah as a fully*
energetic, fully visionary poet,
someone mankind would have
to turn to to interpret life for us,
to console us, to sustain us-but
not the Messiah who had just then
descended from the Realm of Glory2,
not a heterodox and seemingly negligible
religious institution. Did you think fine words
and finer sentiments could do it, some secular
humanism and reformed Christianity could bring
about the massive influx of Truth that the world
needed? The world of literature-and its critics-went
merrily down the highway of the secular critic-priest
to personal civilization, to democratic culture and then
to deconstruction and the unity of all being in language:
literature and criticism matter---heterodoxy---covenant
breaking---matter because they clarify, define with greater
precision, the Source, the Orthodox, for That is not on trial.
Ron Price
22 December 1997
1 Matthew Arnold heir of the romantic vision and a founder of modern criticism in literature.
2 Baha’u’llah revealed His "Hidden Words" in 1958 just after Arnold was appointed to his professorship and began to develop a theology in search of objects of worship, to propagate the best that is known and thought in the world.
*A vahid(from the Persian language, meaning ‘unity’) is a poetic form I use from time to time. It consists of 19 lines of poetry and allows more amplitude than the 14 line sonnet. It is not a poetic form I have found elsewhere.