Anthony Esolen on "The Fortunes of Poetry"

We are ten days out from the publication of The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. The great translator, social critic, and author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen, has this to say about Fortunes​:

​I know of no book quite like Professor Wilson's, because I know of no contemporary scholar possessed of his breadth of learning and clarity of expression, who is at the same time a poet in love with the art, loving it with true intellectual passion.  Wilson attempts no less for poetry than the recovery of a full range of human experience, thought, and religious faith for its content, and a clear philosophical grounding for its form.  What makes his work all the more useful, indeed courageous, is that he does not dismiss the modern, or the vast fever swamps of the contemporary, but shows us where the instincts, and more seldom the conclusions, of such theorists as Eliot and Winters were true, while allowing us to "enjoy" a good measure of the banal, the hysterical, and the inept.  From Plato and Aristotle to Philip Sidney and Matthew Arnold, from Bacon and Descartes to that grayest of eminences grises, John Dewey, from Dante to Mallarme to Dana Gioia, Wilson shows us why we should love poetry, and why we should scorn all those who in the name of the pragmatic or even the poetic have sold her down the river of oblivion.
                                                                           -Anthony Esolen

You will be able to reserve your copy shortly by going to amazon.com or visiting the online home of my publisher, Wiseblood Books (click the picture for link).