The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry
James Matthew WilsonUniversity of Saint Thomas, Houston
Part of our Western Suburban Catholic Culture Series. This event will be live streamed on Zoom.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the American Historian Henry Adams wrote admiringly of the Catholic mind as it found expression in the medieval world. It was beautiful, it was good, but, alas, could not be true. Within a generation, younger American writers were impelled by that same beauty but dared to ask whether they might be equally impelled by the Catholic vision of the world as true. Thus began a great literary adventure, as American poets entered into the Catholic tradition and sought to make poems that conveyed the depth and power of an encounter with the Catholic proclamations of faith as the truth of the world.
James Matthew Wilson is Cullen Foundation Chair in English Literature and the Founding Director of the Master of Fine Arts program in Creative Writing, at the University of Saint Thomas, Houston. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on all manner of subjects secular and divine, and especially on those where we see the two in their intrinsic relation, as truth, goodness, beauty, and being disclose themselves in art and culture, in the political and intellectual life, in our quest for self knowledge and the contemplation of God.
