BOOKS
Hughes, John Jay & Mestrovic, Matthew & Lawson, Steve & Kramer, Victor A. & Phillips, Robert & Schroth, Raymond A.
Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation THOMAS N. TENTLER Princeton, $25 JOHN JAY HUGHES There are probably few Catholics outside academic circles who are aware of the enormous...
...Love Letters is clearly a labor of love...
...This system of canonical penance, the barely recognizable ancestor of our "confession," remained in force from roughly the mid-second to the seventh century...
...Wartime MILOVAN DJILAS Harcourt, Brace & Jovanovich, $14.95 MATTHEW MESTROVIC For 25 years Milovan Djilas, 66, has been Yugoslavia's most famous and persistent dissident...
...In his Belgrade apartment he keeps writing books and articles, which are published and widely read in the West...
...Its stark and factual use of information about the atomic bomb created a poem which condemned a mentality which supported such violence...
...Ibsen is here, and Zelda Fitzgerald, and de Musset, and Hawthorne, and Kafke...
...from Proust, alternating twelve-line sentences with a simple 'Thursday, after leaving you...
...Reduced-rate travel to/from England and Europe...
...And k this, pray...
...But Djilas refuses to fade away...
...Ironically, it was during this same period that he was writing more frequently about race, peace, war, violence, the abuse of language and related problems...
...A poem like "Elegy for James Thurber" is balanced by "And the Children of Birmingham...
...Leading ethicians, military planners, and political scientists discuss the most massive moral problem of our time: the' nuclear arms race between the U.S...
...His Italian contemporary, J. L. Vivaldus, agreed...
...Thomas N. Tentler, Associate Professor of History at the University of Commonweal: 89 Michigan,' carefully describes the complex development briefly sketched above, but devotes most of his attention to the writings of theologians and moralists of the high and late middle ages...
...While Merton chose not to pursue worldly ambition, he did produce significant poetry which is witty, thoughtful and entertaining...
...Third, private confession was made obligatory for all by Lateran IV in 1215...
...Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Wartime is Djilas's account of the process by which erstwhile Communist conspirators transformed themselves into a new ruling and privileged elite...
...Chekhov urges Olga Knipper—a line mirroring several in his Three Sisters—while another message contains the hilarious news that "we've been catching mice," a perfect example of the man's genius for tiny, off-kilter hints of human interest...
...But he considered fornication and adultery in women more serious than in men nevertheless because of the accidental consequences: infanticide, abortion, contraception, displacement of legitimate heirs, or diminution of an inheritance...
...In that collection we see examples of how poetry can be found in unusual places...
...In recent months the Yugoslav press has once again been attacking Djilas in anticipation of the publication in the U.S...
...There are moving letters from Schumann, trying to locate the right intonation in which to say "dear...
...A great experience on an historic site...
...Though these were still lengthy and harsh, they left no remaining disabilities, as in the older system of canonical penance...
...or Faraday's jumbling of affection and chlorides in his letter to Sarah Barnard...
...Further change came with the Irish penitentials, which began to gain acceptance on the Continent from about 600 onwards...
...Deathbed repentance was the first mitigation of a system still unbelievably severe by modern standards...
...Cloth 12.95 Write for 114-title catalog ORBIS BOOKS Maryknoll, NY 10545 For [the Protestant Reformers] sacramental confession would represent an unchristian instrument of torment and an encouragement to hypocrisy — leaving people proud, licentious, and unrepentant...
...Nothing eventually came of it because Hitler regarded the Partisans as bandits and rebels and would not allow the German generals to conclude a truce with them...
...scholarly study is a work of considerable ecumenical significance...
...Still more significant are "Uncollected Poems," some written in 1939, others in 1968...
...that it was magical and formalistic (because of the emphasis on the priest's "power of the keys...
...The Merton of Thirty Poems, A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), and Figures for An Apocalypse (1947) exhibits conventional skill and frequently a derivative method...
...Fewer poems were published during the nineteenfifties, and eight years passed before The Strange Islands appeared...
...it tends toward the pious...
...Djilas's fall from power in 1954 did not come without any forewarning...
...he has imprisoned Djilas twice for writing books and articles critical of Communism...
...For [Catholics] it would remain the highest pastoral art, a just and certain discipline...
...Djilas tells of the disorganization and panic that spread among the Partisan units during the German offensives of 1943 that came close to destroying Tito's forces...
...Many think they know about Thomas Merton (Oh, yes, Seven Storey Mountain...
...Finally, medieval theologians defined more carefully the meaning of the priest's role, while radically enhancing its importance in the process of forgiveness...
...Both systems, however, required the sinner to prove the sincerity of his repentance through asceticism...
...President Tito has tried various tactics to silence the troublesome critic...
...there was so much in his surroundings...
...This mythology provides the justification and legitimacy for Tito's durable dictatorship...
...on this sacrament alone...
...Edited by Harold P. Ford and Francis X. Winters, SJ...
...Tentler by contrast is scrupulously fair and balanced...
...surely Merton would have excluded some...
...As he grew, Merton extended interests and writing methods...
...Throughout this collection we see the complexity of his continuing development...
...While everyone in the middle ages agreed that the sacrament of penance forgave sins with divine efficacy, there was lively debate on a host of questions such as the priest's role, the importance of contrition, and (then as now) the definition of mortal sin...
...Rather join our good friend Mrs...
...The 1963 book also seems to signal an end to one part of the writer's career...
...and that it produced scrupulosity, thus tormenting consciences when it was supposed to console...
...Still, the letters themselves are intelligently chosen and offer tangible rewards, whether for the casual browser or amatory scholar...
...His early poetry includes themes which are sober and predictable, but within it (along with frequent castigation of an evil world left behind) are strains which will develop more fully later...
...Djilas tells of Tito's secret negotiations with the Germans and Tito's order to Partisan units to stop attacking the Zagreb-Belgrade railroad which was vital to the Germans...
...Let's...
...The Collected Poem* of Thomas Merton THOMAS MERTON New Directions, $37.50 VICTOR A. KRAMER Merton wrote compulsively and well throughout his career and this is documented in these 1046 pages...
...Some will wait for a paperback edition...
...Phone 814,637-9178 Kane...
...In their propaganda the Yugoslav Communists have idealized their wartime struggle as something pure and holy...
...and under the penitentials the sacrament could be received more than once— a feature which was especially attractive to clerical sinners...
...Early poems show a young monk at home in the Abbey of Gethsemani, often the setting for the poems...
...Accommodations for 200 international participants...
...But the struggle for power had other facets as well: treachery, betrayal, vanity, bad judgment and often senseless cruelty towards enemy prisoners and compatriots alike...
...Indeed it is impossible to determine, on the evidence of these pages, whether he is Catholic or Protestant...
...In The Tears of Blind Lions (1949) some poems question if Merton need write...
...he felt it was in conflict with his contemplative vocation...
...And Joyce's incredible frankness about love finds a startling echo in his admissions to Nora: "Certain people who know that we are much together often insult me about you...
...Fraser has collected 135 letters spanning eighteen centuries, from Theon and Serenos to Jill Furse, and divided them into seventeen whimsically selec"Language is the amber in which a thousand precious .. thoughts have been .. preserved...
...Penance arose in the second century, as a pastoral solution to the problem of serious post-baptismal sin...
...Inevitably, one wants to know some concrete facts and trace some developments in style, frankness, and address over those eighteen centuries...
...He prints a group of elegies closely together...
...Borgia should, ideally, be presented in Latin script on parchment...
...Her first success, Mary Queen of Scots (1969) demonstrated her knack for historical recapitulation enlivened by very personal passion, and this new book concentrates on love while pretty much letting the history slide...
...Figures as diverse as Carrington and Dorothy Thompson come across as utterly cool and unsparing, while Dean Swift—no surprise —is the least "accessible" of all ("If you write as you do, I shall come the seldomer, on purpose to be pleased with your letters, which I can never look into without wondering how a Brat, who cannot read, can possibly write so well...
...Importantly, Emblems is a book which is sometimes quite distant from such concerns, and some of its poems function like fables, for instance, "Macarius and the Pony...
...Godescalc Rosemondt, a contemporary of Luther and Erasmus and something of a humanist (which in his day was progressive), declared confidently that men sinned more seriously than women because they were more rational...
...making essential but possible demands on Christian consciences...
...When Emblems of A Season of Fury was published in 1963, it was clear that a still different side of Merton had emerged...
...Church in her trip to America...
...The Reformers of the sixteenth century charged that confession was "Pelagian" (because of the emphasis on the sinner's contrition, rather than on God's free gift of forgiveness...
...For what was involved was the institutionalization of forgiveness—the central element in man's relationship with God...
...Stalin, however, Djilas recalls, found the behavior of his soldiers quite human and excusable...
...To the extent that their criticisms live on today in Protestant teaching, and even more in popular prejudice, Tentler...
...The Partisan chiefs rapidly established an intricate hierarchy and a fastidious protocol which Tito meticulously enforced...
...a considerable section of translations, including the important Chuang Tzu translations...
...Humorous verse, such as "Cheese...
...I drink rain, drink wind/ Distinguish poems/ Boiling up out of the cold forest...
...And how could Fraser not include at least one of Joyce's great "dirty" letters to Nora, written from Ireland in 1907...
...One wonders which of our theological or moral truisms will appear equally grotesque to our descendants...
...and many authorities held the female superior position to have been one of the causes of the Flood...
...The substance is essentially admirable, but the outer layer—the "look," the organizing principle, the oyster around the pearl—suffers both from over-arrangement and insufficient design...
...from twelve-line sen"Thursday, after derot—the longltne, a brilliant I skepticism ("So t love you...
...but, importantly, they demonstrate how Merton struggled to use his talent...
...First, penances were greatly lightened, then made arbitrary...
...To I practice which testantism's true concerns, while >est in Catholic is an important I task today...
...however the generosity of New Directions provides us with a full view...
...d social observaful incongruities: at being called losa Luxemburg if an economics ng for a child...
...Wilde's fatal billet-doux to Lord Douglas ("red roseleaf lips," "slim gilt soul," and all) falls into this group, as does the Czarina's insanely optimistic communication to Nicholas ("great and beautiful times are coming") four months before the 1917 Revolution...
...Literary aficionados will jjoy ferreting out clues to the pt.sonae of major writers represented here...
...Merton was apparently a born writer and he sensed this fact...
...when this did not work, he let Djilas travel 3 February 1978: 90 usly than women are rational...
...One wonders how Esther Vanhomrigh stood much of that—but Swift dropped her (not the reverse...
...There are delightful incongruities: Napoleon devastated at being called vous by Josephine...
...As with most anthologies, Fraser's does a great deal of pigeonholing and codifying at the cost of some of her subjects' idiosyncracies...
...And during some of the heaviest fighting, Tito found time to design his own marshal's uniform and had Djilas carry the drawing to Moscow to have a Kremlin tailor make it out of the best Soviet cloth...
...In order to provide Tito daily with fresh milk, the Partisans pulled, dragged and carried a cow from one end of Yugoslavia to the other as they were fleeing from the Germans...
...Its specific cause was Djilas's public attack on the privileges of the new Communist ruling class and his call for the establishment of genuine democracy in Yugoslavia...
...New poems, to have been published as Sensation Time at The Home, provide an index to reading and thinking which Merton did during his final years...
...Moreover, confession itself was now private...
...He was dismayed when upon the liberation of Belgrade in 1944, the Communist chiefs moved into the villas of the dispossessed capitalists...
...For me...
...Merton implies we must confront the realities of the nineteen-sixties...
...Some are dated, with references to Congas and radios...
...Thus, "The Strife Between the Poet and Ambition" echoes Joyce: "The days and years run down the beach/ And throw his ideas in the air/ And wind his similes up to pitch/ And bat his verses out of reach...
...And why no letters written after 1944...
...Love Letter* ANTONIA FRASER Knopf, $8.95 STEVE LAWSON It's not really surprising that Antonia Fraser, author of four best sellers on British history, should have decided to take a breather from all that royal research and put together an anthology called simply Love Letters...
...Others seem inclined toward love, but approach the subject with a coldness, steely wit, or harshness which makes us sympathize with the hapless recipient even as we relish the writer's stylistic bravura...
...These classified sins and prescribed appropriate penances for each one...
...at times Tito has issued strict orders to the controlled Yugoslav press never to mention Djilas's name...
...His Original Child Bomb, a meditation about the atomic bomb, had been printed as a separate volume in 1962...
...Shaw's correspondence with Ellen Terry may have been written "for effect," but 3 February 1978: 92 alzac rhapsodizes and proceeds to r in lieu of more s.) And Joyce's bout love finds a s admissions to 5 who know that 1 often insult me them calmly, dism but their least art about like a simply couldn't rtters from Schuthe right intonaiy "dear...
...Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation The medieval confessional literature which he examines strongly confirms what we know from other sources about the theological pluralism of the middle ages...
...But despite great personal hardships Djilas has continued his lonely fight from within Yugoslavia, believing that a dissident is most effective if he continues to live under the system which he is criticizing...
...Their works, written primarily for the clergy who heard confessions, brings us as close as we are likely to get to what actually happened when medieval Christians confessed their sins...
...He felt uncomfortable as soon as a privileged class began forming within the Partisan ranks...
...Yet, ironically enough, the two most powerful letters of all are by Catherine of Aragon, a deposed queen, and Camille Desmoulins, a betrayed revolutionary—neither of them professional writers...
...In the midst of the war Tito proclaimed himself Marshal of Yugoslavia, in imitation of and to the annoyance of Stalin...
...This volume is absolutely necessary for understanding Merton the poet...
...His first book of poetry, called Thirty Poems, appeared in 1944...
...The Joy of Letters, almost...
...Much of this ground has been covered already by European scholars, with whose works Tentler shows creditable familiarity...
...The book has enraged Tito because in it Djilas tells many little known but true things about the World War II Partisan struggle in Yugoslavia, which the Yugoslav leader does not want publicized...
...Once again we see that the severe limitation of this pluralism from Trent to Vatican II was an exception to the historical norm...
...Now we can read poems which precede that first book...
...There you will find original scenes...
...He often got himself into scrapes that were politically unwise...
...Because it could be used only once, and because the penitential works it imposed were so onerous, it came more and more to be postponed until death was imminent...
...that it encouraged moral laxity (because it made forgiveness easy and supposedly accepted repentance through fear, in the place of true sorrow for sin...
...these Collected Poems will force a revaluation of stereotyped impressions of a poet who began serious writing while a student at Columbia and who is represented here by all his published poetry, and much more—early, uncollected, and humorous poems, translations, drafts, and a gathering unpublished at his death...
...preserving the divine order in Christ's Church...
...Her introduction deals gracefully with some questions and resolutely avoids some others...
...Lastly, do I vow, that mine eyes desire you above all things," concludes Catherine's last message to Henry VIII, the king who exiled her from his court...
...But his is the first fulls;ale study of the subject in English since the violently anti-Catholic 3volume History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church by Henry Charles Lea (Philadelphia, 1896), whose diligent research and erudition were matched only by the utter perversity" of his interpretative methods and conclusions...
...It is sobering, however, to find how much was confidently asserted as selfevident which appears today absurd or even bizarre...
...Rosa Luxemburg exulting in the gift of an economics tract and then wishing for a child...
...Second, contrition rather than the performance of penitential works became the essential element in the sinner's forgiveness...
...there are twentythree sacred towns," Balzac rhapsodizes to Countess Hanska, and proceeds to explain them all to her in lieu of more customary professions...
...Thus he remains the outstanding Yugoslav political figure of the present next to President Tito himself...
...It meant a shift from purgation by doing penance to merely receiving it when penitential exercises were no longer possible...
...And while inevitably the intellectuals are in the majority—after all, they write for a living—the nonliterati are here in force...
...PA 16735 Commonweal: 93 Merton...
...the question remains whether Fraser's solicitude was what this project required...
...at other times, in anger, Tito has launched scathing public campaigns of condemnation against his former top aide...
...Some hardly seem to be "love" letters at all, with their detailed accounts of everything from household chores to horrendous battles...
...it is a private dream-like poem, and simultaneously a consideration of how western man ignores the myth-dream of other cultures...
...e WILAS 'anovich, $14.95 STROVIC n Djilas, 66, has >st famous and esident Tito has to silence the has imprisoned ing books and nmunism...
...He simply couldn't keep anything back...
...when let Djilas travel abroad (probably hoping he would stay there...
...But the letters, good as they are, challenge Fraser's treatment of them...
...and the U.S.S.R...
...I listen to them calmly, disdaining to answer them but their least word tumbles my heart about like a bird in a storm...
...Content aside, there is something unappealing and conformist about seeing Lucrezia Borgia, Abelard, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Pierre Curie all writing away in the same Apollo typeface...
...Appendixes (some 400 pages) increase the value of this volume...
...from Diderot—the longest one in this volume, a brilliant fusion of nostalgia and skepticism ("So you think that I really love you...
...Nevertheless thanks to his considerable talents as a political thinker and novelist he has been able to maintain his personal integrity and considerable influence in intellectual circles in Western Europe and the U.S...
...As a result Djilas spent many years in a Communist jail...
...Yet for each count in the Reformation's indictment of the sacrament of penance there is some evidence...
...Those who forfeited the grace of baptism by a grave moral lapse could be reconciled with the church only after a lengthy process of purgation, each stage of which was public: confession before the whole community, years of severe penitential works, formal readmission to fellowship...
...And what makes you think this, pray...
...Charlotte BufFs ers...
...ultimately because he did not worry about success, he became free to write valuable poetry...
...of his latest book, Wartime...
...and the funniest P.S...
...Hence it comes as no surprise to learn that despite the close attention given to penance, none of the great medieval theologians, not even Thomas Aquinas, was able to give a definitive explanation of this sacrament...
...utterly failing to comfort them, and leading ultimately to damnation...
...ETHICS and NUCLEAR STRATEGY...
...Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation THOMAS N. TENTLER Princeton, $25 JOHN JAY HUGHES There are probably few Catholics outside academic circles who are aware of the enormous changes in the sacrament of penance during twenty centuries of church history...
...I ted categories—"Declarations," "Ecstasies," "Separations," "Total Love," and so on—which do break things up into manageable parts but have the unsettling effect of implying that this is how one writes that kind of love note...
...For example, "Elegy for the Monastery Barn" illustrates how Merton found poetry in the commonplace...
...Admittedly Djilas has few political followers in Yugoslavia...
...Such seemingly inordinate attention to one of the five "lesser" sacraments was justified...
...and Desto Lucile—"The from me . . ."— moving, making does encourage 3d as they are, itment of them, with Ellen Terry "for effect," but is this a reason to eliminate Shaw in toto...
...Djilas does not deny the heroum, the bravery and the often reckless selfsacrifice that were part of the Partisan war, of which Djilas was himself one of the top military and political commanders...
...Serious readers of Merton cannot do without this material which includes long complex poems, lyrics, and prose-poems (reprinted from Raids on The Unspeakable, 1965...
...By the middle of the tenth century the penitentials had everywhere ousted the original system of canonical penance...
...Early Poems" (1940-1942), known to scholars for years, may surprise because of its wit and enthusiasm...
...Though originally frowned on, this practice was sanctioned by Pope Leo the Great in the middle of the fifth century...
...and that in each case there is far more evidence against the charge than for it...
...that formalistic (be> on the priest's that it encourecause it made supposedly actugh fear, in the r for sin...
...Penance as today's Catholics know it evolved gradually between the ninth and thirteenth centuries as the result of four further changes...
...Its crafted, sometimes irreverent poems, are, as one is entitled, a "Dirge for the World Joyce Died In...
...As for instance when he publicly upbraided a Russian general for the behavior of the Soviet forces when they entered Belgrade: they had raped the Serbian women and plundered the inhabitants...
...A note from Lewis Carroll to a little girl, gravely informing her that she will receive 182 kisses in a box, is right out of Alice in Wonderland, while Stendhal's and Balzac's letters combine passion and precision in the most characteristic ways...
...Tentler has little difficulty showing that not all of these charges can be true...
...but this thick tome is worth its purchase price because it reflects all facets of a developing career as poet...
...personal revelations and social observation...
...and so forth...
...and the fun, of all people, finished a preZelda Fitzgerald, Hawthorne, and >n Keats, Byron, onically enough, letters of all are gon, a deposed Desmoulins, a —neither of them ^astly, do I vow, s you above all lerine's last mesthe king who court...
...He knew that poetry remained a good land for the pilgrim...
...And a timid note from Joyce to Nora Barnacle is affecting chiefly thanks to its moment of writing: the day prior to their first date on June 16, 1904, to be immortalized as Bloomsday in Ulysses...
...His J. L. Vivaldus, lered fornication en more serious eless because of juences: infanti;eption, displaceeirs, or diminue. One wonders )gical or moral qually grotesque lie sixteenth cenfession was "Pelhe emphasis on , rather than on orgiveness...
...1,1978 Canterbury, England Thama: "THE MBLE TODAY" Housed in modern Christ Church College in the Cathedral's shadow...
...While I can understand Fraser's defense of organizing the book along "emotional" rather than chronological, geographical, or alphabetical lines, a more thoughtful cross-reference system might have helped: it became annoying to have to flip between a particular letter and the back of the book for notes on the writer's life and the letter's context...
...Cables is fun, satire, parody, meditation about wisdom and language and more...
...ever from, of all people, Chopin: "I have just finished a prelude...
...C. Trench, 19th Century) SUMMER LANGUAGE PROGRAM (Biblical Greek and Hebrew) June 5 - July 29 PRINCETON THEOLOGICALSEMINARY Princeton, New Jersey 08540 Princeton Theological Seminary admits students of any race, color and national or ethnic origin and without regard to sex or handicap...
...Other letters show minds at work between protestations of love: Jefferson's note to Maria Cosway, which first instructs her in the joys of Italy and suddenly turns patriotic ("But why go to Italy...
...and Desmoulins's final letter to Lucile—"The shores of light recede from me . . ."— is almost unbearably moving, making it appear as if death does encourage ultimate eloquence...
...Goethe objecting to Charlotte Buffs tears smudging her letters...
...Curie should be a hasty scrawl between lab experiments...
...There was wide agreement, for instance, that in sexual intercourse all positions but that of the male superior were in varying degrees sinful...
...To arrive at a theory and practice which will do justice to Protestantism's true insights and positive concerns, while retaining all that is best in Catholic tradition and practice, is an important part of the ecumenical task today...
...Let's go abroad...
...Djilas was Tito's representative in the talks with the Germans, which the Yugoslav leaders have always sought to deny...
...OPTIONAL TOURS: HOLY LAND HISTORIC BRITAIN CATHEDRAL CITIES CANTESS REPRESENTATIVE 150GrmvesSt...
...It is difficult, yet worth the effort of reading for we learn "birds fly uncorrected across burnt lands/ The surest home is pointless:/ We learn by the cables of orioles[.]" The Geography of Lograire is still more ambitious and removed from the earlier somewhat predictable CANTERBURY SUMMER SCHOOL • Ecumenical • International July 20-Aug...
...Well before Vatican II Karl Rahner used to lecture at Innsbruck for a full semester (or was it two...
...and ulosity, thus tor'hen it was supler has little diflot all of these ind that in each evidence against t. t in the Reforf the sacrament me evidence...
...One more or less definable group is interesting not so much for content as for what I'd call situational irony: reading these letters, we can react accordingly because we're aware of what transpired later...
...Not to mention Keats, Byron, and Rousseau...
...This literature also affords a basis for evaluating the fierce attack on sacramental confession mounted by the sixteenth century Reformers...
...For instance, she acknowledges immediately that her aim wasn't to collect "literary" letters, and indeed the eclecticism of the book is its strong point: George Sand and Anne Boleyn, Rosa Luxemburg and Jonathan Swift, Proust and Jefferson are all represented...
...And while the ordinary Partisan fighter often went hungry and cold and was subjected to brutal discipline— on occasion Partisans were shot by their leaders for taking without authorization a piece of bread or a handful of grapes from villagers—Tito maintained a mistress at headquarters and was provided with other comforts...
...His last works, reprinted here, are Cables to The Ace and The Geography of Lograire...
...Inspiring lectures by world leaders...
...Unfortunately for Djilas, though an occasional individual like himself may be quite happy to give up Commonweal: 91 the privileges of power, a ruling class never is...
...So content seemed the poet of these years that he even requested that he no longer write poetry...
...I can appreciate Fraser's preference for her Pleas, Rejections, and Gallantries, but even the pleasures of eclecticism get disconcerting after a while and the mind gets tired of sorting out Appollonius, Chekhov, Charles I, and Balzac, all right after one another under "Separations...
...Any reader not convinced, incidentally, that anti-Catholicism remains alive and well should take note that this and sixteen other works by this learned bigot are still in print today, almost seven decades after Lea's death in 1909...
...It is to Djilas's credit that he never liked nor was impressed by rank and privilege...
...Hopkins, Eliot, Dylan Thomas, and Blake helped to form the early poems...
...as well as fragments and drafts, and concrete verse (11 pages each) provide further insights into Merton's craft...
...and assuring, as well as anything in this world could, the consoling gift of eternal salvation...
...We might quibble about some of the poems...
...Even then permanent disabilities remained, restricting the religious and even civil rights of reconciled penitents...
Vol. 105 • February 1978 • No. 3
