After explaining his new methodology, Bidney identifies and discusses epiphanies in the works of William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Walter Pater, Thomas Carlyle, Leo Tolstoy, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Taking his cue from the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard, Bidney postulates that any writer’s epiphany pattern usually shows characteristic elements (earth, air, fire, water), patterns of motion (pendular, eruptive, trembling), and/or geometric shapes. Bachelard’s analytic approach involves studying patterns of perceived experiencephenomenologybut unlike most phenomenologists, Bidney does not speculate on internal processes of consciousness. Instead, he concentrates on literary epiphanies as objects on the printed page, as things with structures that can be detected and analyzed for their implications.
Bidney, then, first identifies each author’s paradigm epiphany, finding that both the Romantics and the Victorians often label such a paradigm as a vision or dream, thereby indicating its exceptional intensity, mystery, and expansiveness. Once he identifies the paradigm and shows how it is structured, he traces occurrences of each writer’s epiphany pattern, thus providing an inclusive epiphanic portrait that enables him to identify epiphanies in each writer’s other works. Finally, he explores the implications of his analysis for other literary approaches: psychoanalytical, feminist, influence-oriented or intertextual, and New Historical.

Patterns of Epiphany: From Wordsworth to Tolstoy, Pater, and Barrett Browning

Literature & Fiction

Bidney, Martin

History & Criticism

Southern Illinois University Press

First extensive comparative study of William Blake and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the most ambitious poet-thinkers of the Romantic era. Each apparently unaware of the other's poetic work, Blake and Goethe made strikingly similar personal and literary mental journeys in quest of their goals.

Blake and Goethe: Psychology, Ontology, Imagination

Univ of Missouri Pr

A selection of poems  by one of Islam’s greatest poetic voices.   “In his poetry, Hafiz has inscribed undeniable truth  indelibly … Hafiz has no peer!” — Goethe Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance includes 103 pioneering poems by the  medieval Persian poet and Sufi monk Muhammad Shemseddin Hafiz (ca. 1320–1389). With the rich complexity of a character in Shakespeare, Hafiz  celebrates his pleasures and longed-for lovers in a context of Qur’anic  narrative allusion, allowing his poems to hint at stages in a spiritual quest. First translated into German in 1814, by Joseph von Hammer,  Hafiz’s poetry initiated a revolution in the mind of Johann Wolfgang von  Goethe, and Hafiz became, for Goethe, a Muslim mentor. Hafiz’s love poems are  mainly directed to the men he met in taverns, but Hammer often changed the  gender of the addressees to placate contemporary opinion in Germany. Hammer rendered Hafiz’s poetry in a  variety of newly invented verse forms as well as traditional ones carried over  from ancient Greece and  Rome, which he felt would make them more acceptable to readers acquainted with  such themes in Greek and Latin verse. Though always faithful to Hammer’s  pioneering poetic forms, Martin Bidney’s new translations restore the genders as  they appeared in the original Persian. In his poetic “replies” to Hafiz, Bidney  clarifies the implications of Hafiz’s Qur’anic allusions and Islamic legendary  references, and he also elucidates  parallels  between medieval Persian and various Western cultures by introducing newly  translated relevant passages from such works as Carmina Burana, Ovid’s Amores,  and Horace’s Odes.   Hammer’s translation of Hafiz was  already a pioneering West-East synthesis when it inspired Goethe to try to top  it in his own experimental West-East Divan (translated by Bidney in 2010), and Bidney’s translation of Hafiz’s  groundbreaking, varied, verbally colorful, and melodious poetry will delight  the general reader and fascinate the scholar. “…[a]  fascinating and appealing book.” — CHOICE

Poems of Wine and Tavern Romance: A Dialogue with the Persian Poet Hafiz (Global Academic Publishing)

Ḥāfiẓ

Poetry

Global Academic Publishing

Martin Bidney’s A Unifying Light contains 140 original poems that respond to passages of the Qur’an. This unifying scripture of Islam is a work of poetic depth. The lyrics deal with five barrier-breaking themes. Interreligious unity. The Qur’an is a book of comparative religion. The Jewish Torah and the Christian Gospels are each called “a guidance and a light” in the Qur’an, and the Psalms of David are sacred to Muslims. Torah, Psalms, Gospels, Qur’an—four holy books of Islam. Shared orientation. The three chief orienting texts within the holy books of the three religions are one in spirit. These include the passages “Hear, O Israel,” “Our Father,” and “The Opening,” initial chapter of the Qur’an. Each conveys the serene joy of shared wonder, relating the wakened heart to the Encompassing Boundless. Theory of metaphor. The Qur’an urges the centrality of likeness, metaphor, emblem, and similitude to the comprehension of the transcendent. We gain perspectives on poetry—and on the value of sharing metaphors. Interscriptural Parables. The Qur’an is filled with parables of major figures from the Jewish and Christian scriptures, with some parables about the Prophet Muhammad. Discoveries are abundant in new stories about all three traditions: the people embody the moral themes. Love as the Unifying Moral Light. The four Qur’an-taught virtues most exalting and heartwarming are subsets of the theme of Love. These are generosity, peace of mind, forgiveness or pardon, and stewardship. Each is a state of being and a mode of action. All arise from a comprehensive empathy appropriate to the world-illuminating “Lord of the Daybreak.”

A Unifying Light: Lyrical responses to the Qur'an (East-West Bridge Builders)

Religion & Spirituality

CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform

Shakespeare's Sonnets (published in 1609 but mostly written in the 1590s) offer surprises everywhere, but two big ones in particular. These relate to the plot and to the range of the poet's passionate feeling. The story line has the makings of a high suspense love drama, but the author wants, more crucially, to explore his thoughts on a myriad of topics in what feels like verse journaling - moody, mercurial, unpredictable, and intense. That's why the genre of the narrative hovers between a play and what we'd now call a psychological novel.Complicating both the dramatic tension and the introspective depth is the bisexual range of the poet's passionate temperament. The fact that his boyfriend and mistress are attracted to each other will account for some of the strong conflicts in the speaker's mind. But the wild oscillations of his feeling toward each of them are also rooted in his widely receptive sexual nature.I'm a dialogic poet, carrying on a long tradition of friendly rivalry among verse writers. Here I undertake a book-length dialogue in sonnets with Shakespeare. The best way to respond to a poem that won't let go of you is to write another poem and try to make it worthy of the first.Often I sum up a lyric from a new perspective. Or I'll respond with parallel or contrasting memories and imaginings of my own. Poets, philosophers, mythic figures, musicians, or novelists may enter my replies. Psychological sidelights will be many. The possibilities revealed by the genre of lyrical response appear unlimited. There's no better con-verse-ation partner than Shakespeare, who gave me a deep love for his favorite lyric form. Entering into it, I assumed a stranger-self, and it made a stranger me.

Shakespair: Sonnet Replies to the 154 Sonnets of William Shakespeare

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The Boundless and the Beating Heart is a dialogue with Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), a world-class poet—Gustav Mahler’s favorite—whose lyrics have been set to music nearly 2000 times. I translate the first 4 books of The Wisdom of the Brahman: A Didactic Poem in Fragments (1835–6). It’s a guidebook fashioned by a western Sufi pilgrim, a lyrical imaginer who in a poetic diary is journaling his way toward an understanding of the human condition. The word “Brahman” indicates a solitary thinker, but in this book he doesn’t walk alone. The translator replies to each of Rückert’s religious musings, nature thoughts, reveries, parables, anecdotes, maxims, and jokes with a related original poem in the same lyric form the poet used. A comparative scholar of world scriptures, Rückert wants The Wisdom to be not only broad but deep, so he aims at universal thought-songs not confined to one tradition. His mentor J. W. von Goethe had a similar goal in West-East Divan (1819), and the Sufi sage Ibn Arabi formulated it by saying that all religions are shape-giving containers for Spirit. Rückert’s “Brahman” reads no scripture but that of Nature. Each “gleam” of insight he gets he will make into a “rosary bead” of prayerful poetry with the rounded shape of the changeful horizon. Only the human “heart” can transmit these gifts. Boundless Reality and the unbounded heart, as it beats in rhythmic song, are in dialogue. Goethe offered two more symbols that clarify Rückert’s gleam and bead. Goethe views inhaling and exhaling, concentration and release, as two “gifts of grace,” like the receiving of a gleam and the shaping of it into a poetic bead. I combine this idea with another one, taken from Goethe’s personal myth of Lucifer and God. Seeing Lucifer as repeatedly rebelling against and then returning to God, Goethe thinks we should all live like this, alternating between self-assertion and self-transcendence, between “selving” and “unselving.” This image of contrasting movements reveals the implication of gleam and bead for moral psychology. They are emblems of the thoughtful and the active life. The four “books” of our dialogue develop these seed-ideas. Book I shows Being as activated in Becoming when we alternate between heart and horizon. Book II offers moral psychology, illustrating “selving” and “unselving” in parable-stories. Book III turns toward maxims, free-associative journaling, and humor. Book IV adds to our awareness of the problems of practical life a grateful recognition of the aid given by prior finders of the Boundless in the beating heart.

The Boundless and the Beating Heart: Friedrich Ruckert's Wisdom of the Brahman Books 1-4 (East-West Bridge Builders)

The works of Ibn Arabi (1165–1240) are a gift of immense value to the creative artist, for this prolific Sufi thinker tells of God the All-Imaginer, Poet of the Pluriverse. The inmost Being of the Real, the Infinite, not knowable by mortal minds, is symbolically shown in the worlds and creatures God imagines, which are metaphors. God is a poet, and only a poet can “taste” the Real via sensory emblems. The Real must be imagined. Is Ibn Arabi, then, the prose counterpart to Rumi (1207–1273), the world’s greatest mystic poet? This might be true, except that Ibn Arabi’s prose is so ingenious and heart-expanding in resourceful metaphor that even in a prose medium he, too, is a Great Imaginer. For Ibn Arabi, God is a longing Lover, whose breath of yearning was the origin of our world. Responding to His love, we increase His fullness of Being! God’s activity is one of partial, unrepeatable, extremely rapid poetic self-disclosures. He is vividly present in His Names, not Platonic “Forms” but rather Forces that call on us to embody them and so to actualize changingly the potentials in God’s Mind. Three sources helped me with the dramatic monologue sonnets I wrote for Ibn Arabi to speak. In The Meccan Revelations we learn that beliefs are knots: they tie things together but can also tie you up. Religions are only cups giving color and shape to the water of spirit. Potential beings in God’s Mind cry out to be created, and when given birth they are wedded to Him forever, so deep is their love of embodied Being. In The Bezels of Wisdom Moses tells of Pharaoh’s compassionate wife who influenced her husband to turn to God before he died. Jesus thinks delay in answering a prayer may mean the Lord wants to hear again the voice of His beloved. In The Seven Days of the Heart we transcend the thinghood of things to feel the breath they bear of the Lover that had made them.

God the All-Imaginer: Wisdom of Sufi Master Ibn Arabi in 99 Modern Sonnets (East-West Bridge Builders)

Jump in! The six "chapbook" collections were composed purely for pleasure - mine and yours. I have one theme and one technique. The theme is dialogue, and the technique is music made with words. Every numbered entry is dialogic, an encounter of two voices. First I write about fictive taxi drivers I talk with. Then I hold dialogues with 48 paintings by Belgian surrealist Ren#65533; Magritte (1898-1967), one of the world's most enjoyable painters. My third venture is to converse with the spirit of the Gallic ballade writer Fran#65533;ois Villon (1431-ca. 1463. I alter his ballad form in small ways while keeping the Frenchman's tight, sweet harmonies. Project number four is to reveal my "Russian Loves" by translating some all-time favorite lyrics from the Russian, while answering them with "replies" or commentary poems with similar forms or topics. I focus on Afanasy Fet (1820-1892), a major though neglected Russian master. The strangest item in this section is my re-translation of K. D. Balmont's version of Poe's "The Bells" back into English. Ten times better than Poe!My fifth offering is a set of "reactions" to the flash fictions of Franz Kafka. I include comments on his life and writing - plus a comment on a slightly longer story in my poem "Blumfeld's Two Balls." Don't skip this one...Finally, you get a tour of Dante's hell, freshly updated in a sonnet for each canto, with some "other treats" to clarify the medieval monsterpiece.You see that dialogue's my theme: I'm always responding to a mentor, a guide, a teacher, a friend. As for the technique - music made of words - I care just as much about that. Read every piece aloud and enjoy what it does for your ears.This is the fifteenth poetry book by Martin Bidney, Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Binghamton University.

Six Dialogic Poetry Chapbooks: Taxi Drivers, Magritte Paintings, Gallic Ballads, Russian Loves, Kafka Reactions, Inferno Update (East-West Bridge Builders)

In the Bible text called “The Song of Songs, Which Is Solomon’s” we have one of the most passionate love poems ever composed, and a shining guide. Because the word “song” will imply, for most music lovers, a regular, steady rhythm with word harmonies and usually rhymes, I have versified the Authorized Version in heart-welcomed English meters with patterns of assonance, alliteration, and rhyming. King Solomon addresses loving words to an unnamed woman he calls “the Shulamite,” and in A Lover’s Art I name her Shula. Solomon also authored the biblical Proverbs, a book of wisdom, and in the 16th century arose a tradition of regarding the recipient of the love hymn as Lady Wisdom (Hokhmah, or in Greek Sophia). In stage three of this wonderful progress, Kabbalah or Jewish mystical thought has tended to equate the woman embodying wisdom to the Shekhinah, or indwelling female emanative presence of God, the vitalizing energy of the world. Invigorated by the Solomonic example, I have replied to his masterly Canticle with 280 original love lyrics. To Shula, Sophia, Shekhinah--or Woman, Wisdom, World-- dedicate this modern dialogue with my mentor in the lover’s art of song.

A Lover's Art: The Song of Songs in Musical English Meters, plus 280 Original Love Poems in Reply--A Dialogue with Scripture (East-West Bridge Builders)

Theoretical Anthropology is a major contribution to the historical and critical study of the assumptions underlying the development of modern cultural anthropology. In the new introduction, Martin Bidney discusses the present state of anthropology and contrasts it with the scene surveyed in Theoretical Anthropology. He discusses the relevance of David Bidney’s work to our present concerns. Also included in this work is the second edition’s introductory essay by David Bidney, written fifteen years after the first edition of Theoretical Anthropology. Here the author examines his original aims in writing this book. Theoretical Anthropology has helped to create among anthropologists the present climate of theoretical self-awareness and broad humanistic concerns. It has become a standard reference work for anthropologists as well as sociologists.

Theoretical Anthropology

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Routledge

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