United States or Eritrea ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Enthusiasts may, according to their tastes, laud the poet of Byronic worldliness or of Shelleyan otherworldliness. But, of course, this is only because this time boasts of no artist of first rank. When one considers the preëminent names in the history of poetry, it is not so easy to make the disjunction.
Much modern poetry is written for such readers, for men and women whose minds are sensitive to intricate emotional experience, who can and do respond to otherworldliness, to the subtly romantic, the finely aesthetic, and the intricately ideal. They deserve whatever poetry they may desire. The important point to note is that they do not get it.
He would say that if the infinitely complex study of emotional mind-states that lies behind the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson, or the eerie otherworldliness of Yeats, or the harsh virility of Sandburg is to be regarded as an intensification and clarification of experience, he begs to be excused.
Churchill's ideas, on the other hand, represented a different concept, one which may be called churchism, or pietistic otherworldliness, a concept which encourages the church's retreat from the world.
In other words, the otherworldliness of the church hardly harmonizes with the worldliness of God, Who chose to create the world, to speak and act in and through it, and Who finally entered it and made the life of man in history His right hand.
This may be noted in much of the work of Botticelli and the Italians of the fifteenth century. Botticelli's figures seldom have any weight; they drift about as if walking on air, giving a delightful feeling of otherworldliness. The hands of the Madonna that hold the Child might be holding flowers for any sense of support they express.
In the marriage of his father and mother, delight in the senses, absorption in the turbulence of human passions, is likely to meet complete otherworldliness and unusual spiritual sensitiveness. There is a tradition that all great men have resembled their mothers; this may in part account for the fact that the poet often writes of her.
"In general I don't revere sacred things as I should," she continued, with her arm in her escort's, and "Blest be the tie" still dragging in their adagio footsteps; "but my mother has all my life been so sacred to me not that she was of the sort that they call otherworldly I don't care for otherworldliness nearly as much as I should "
He avoided the error of mediaeval anchorites and mystics in setting an exaggerated value upon otherworldliness. In his desire to win a crown of glory hereafter he did not forget that the present life has its simple duties, in the exact performance of which the welfare of society mainly consists.
A very different pair of charges and far more vital than those more or less economic accusations of worldliness and otherworldliness which we have just considered, concern the standards of goodness preached by the Church and her own alleged incapacity to live up to them.
Word Of The Day