The Myth of the Enlightenment: Essays

by Frederick Glaysher

Overview

Fourteen years in the making, The Myth of the Enlightenment is Frederick Glaysher’s first collection of literary essays since The Grove of the Eumenides in 2007. Divided into three sections, these essays and reviews were all written during the 21st Century, with many of them central to his evolving intellectual and spiritual struggle to write his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, which he completed and published in late 2012.

These essays open up Glaysher’s own biography and his life-long interest in the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, John Milton, Saul Bellow, Robert Hayden, and other poets and writers, offering a fresh, new vision for literature and culture.

From the Preface

For over three-hundred years, civilization has been under the sway of the Myth of the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment initiated a highly beneficial movement away from autocratic government and religion, a stifling reliance on past authorities, accompanied by an ever-increasing scientific and practical development, very early on stress and cracks began to be felt in the structure of the psyche and society. The twentieth century witnessed those cracks transmogrifying into crevasses of gaping and violent proportions, often circling the globe.

The last few decades have borne all the more testimony that the Myth of the Enlightenment has become part of the problem and no longer sufficiently comprises what is needed to resolve and heal what civilization is suffering from.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780982677834
Publisher:	Earthrise Press
Publication date:	09/04/2014
Pages:	230
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.56(d)

About the Author

Frederick Glaysher is an epic poet, rhapsode, poet-critic, and the author or editor of ten books. Glaysher studied at the University of Michigan with the American poet Robert Hayden and edited his collected prose and poetry. He holds two degrees from the University of Michigan, including a Master's in English, and is the Literary Executor of the Hayden Estate.He lived for more than fifteen years outside Michigan-in Japan, where he taught at Gunma University in Maebashi; in Arizona, on the ColoradoRiver Indian Tribes Reservation, site of one of the largest internment camps for Japanese-Americans during WWII; in Illinois, on the central farmlands and on the Mississippi; ultimately returning to his suburban hometown of Rochester. A Fulbright-Hays scholar to China in 1994, he studied at Beijing University, the Buddhist Mogao Caves on the old Silk Road, and elsewhere in China, including Hong Kong and the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. While a National Endowment for the Humanities scholar in 1995 on India, he further explored the conflicts betweenthe traditional regional civilizations of Islamic and Hindu cultures and modernity. An accredited Presenter at The 8 Parliament of the World's Religions 2021.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

I The Myth of the Enlightenment

“Of True Religion” by John Milton 15

Tolstoy and the Last Station of Modernity 20

Leo Tolstoy’s Hadji Murad 36

The Poet’s Religion of Rabindranath Tagore 40

Tagore and Literary Adaptation 66

Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein—The Closing of the American Soul 73

Robert Hayden Under a High Window of Angell Hall 80



Aristotle’s Poetics and Epic Poetry 95

Decadence, East and West 99

The Post-Gutenberg Revolution—A Manifesto 119

The Quantum Physics of the Soul 141

II Reviews and Interviews

Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair 147

The American Scholar and the Decline of the English Department 149

Fang Lizhi and Human Rights in China 154

Bitter Winds, Indeed 158

Global Tragedies of Our Own Making 162

To My Opposite Number in Texas 164

Interview of the Author of The Bower of Nil 170

My Odyssey as an Epic Poet: Interview 180

III Race in America

Robert Hayden’s Angle of Ascent 195

Creating Equal. Ward Connerly 202

Enough... Juan Williams 203

White Guilt. Shelby Steele 207

Reawakening the Dream. Shelby Steele 211

The Quest for Cosmic Justice. Thomas Sowell 214

Black Rednecks and White Liberals. Thomas Sowell 217

For Betty—Oh God, What Have We Done? David Horowitz 223

Winning the Race. John McWhorter 225

Editorial Reviews

"In short this is a book I'll be returning to for the rest of this year and no doubt afterward. I'm glad it exists and I'm grateful for the wisdom it sends my way." —Laurence Goldstein, Department of English, University of Michigan

“In an era in which the value of human life has become as precarious and narrow as the study of the humanities itself, we need Glaysher’s voice more than ever.” —Phillip M. Richards, Department of English, Colgate University author of Black Heart: The Moral Life of Recent African American Letters

"This is a marvelous book of eloquent essays by Frederick Glaysher, one that honors the old literary masters, East and West, while exploring the deepest corners of spirituality and its implication for ameliorating the conditions of modern humanity. Reading each essay, whether it be Rabindranath Tagore, Saul Bellow, Tolstoy, or Robert Hayden, as examples, feels like entering into the secret chambers of the writer’s consciousness struggling “with what is universal in the human being”—struggling to express the universality of the human spirit:

Now more than ever, after centuries of falling down into the bottomless pit of nihilism, the world needs to recover the vision of universality, what the great religions and people of various centuries and cultures have in common. For all too long, humanity has obsessed with what distinguishes and separates, what divides people from one another, setting up our little racial, nationalistic gods and idols….Universality embraces all persuasions and transcends them. That is the great challenge.

"This quest is, as Glaysher clearly reveals, the never ceasing search for creative unity to which he and many others have given over their life, through their thoughts, words, and actions. The essays in this book aim for the author’s highest vision; that is, an attempt to “embody and represent the fullness of human reflection,” an inclination intended not just for academics, but a voice for all, and one that speaks to our time. And to that end, Glaysher has allowed himself to draw “from the soil of literature and culture whatever they need to produce and sustain their fruit.” In talking about his relationship with Robert Hayden, Glaysher tells us, “his own poetry had worked its way deep in to my consciousness.” I cannot think of a better way to describe how this book impresses itself on the reader; if there are millions of people waiting for a sign, as Allan Bloom is cited as saying, then this book is assuredly evidence of what such a sign looks like." —Julie Clayton, New Consciousness Review, Portland, Oregon

From the Publisher