Bøker av Frederick Glaysher

Twenty years in the making, in Letters from the American Desert, Glaysher reflects on the cultural, political, and religious history of Western and non-Western civilizations, pondering the dilemmas of postmodernity, in a compelling struggle for spiritual knowledge and truth. In what is a highly autobiographical work, fully cognizant of the relativism and nihilism of modern life, Glaysher finds a deeper meaning and purpose in a universal Vision. Confronting the antinomies of the soul, grounded in the dialectic, Glaysher charts a path beyond the postmodern desert.Alluding extensively to Martin Luther and W. B. Yeats at All Souls Chapel, "metaphors for poetry," from Yeats's book A Vision, Glaysher considers the example of the global, universal message of the oneness of God, all religions, and humankind, holding out a new hope and peaceful Vision for a world in spiritual and global crisis.Far from a theocracy, Glaysher envisions a modest separation of church and state, as the will of God, in an unorganized religion, a universal synthesis of all spiritual and wisdom traditions, in harmony and balance with universal peace, in a global age of pluralism, where religious belief is a distinctive mark of the individual, not collective, communal identity."Mr. Glaysher, in my view, is taking some positive steps to resolve some serious issues in the Baha'i community. ...The Faith needs a total overhaul. It has forgotten what the real Faith is." -Joel Bjorling, author of The Baha'i Faith: A Historical Bibliography. (New York. Garland Publishing, 1985)."A valuable contribution to understanding the real history of the Bahai Faith." -Yahoo! Reform Bahai Group

From New Preface (April 15, 2024):"All the essays in The Grove of the Eumenides were written after 1982 when I wrote my first draft of a plot outline for my epic poem The Parliament of Poets. These essays constitute and record my background study, as it were, over a period of more than twenty years, leading up to their publication in 2007... The Grove of the Eumenides is the foundation upon which my epic poem is built."Twenty years in the making, in The Grove of the Eumenides, Frederick Glaysher evokes a global vision beyond the prevailing postmodern conceptions of life and literature that have become firmly entrenched in contemporary world culture.East and West meet in a new synthesis of a global vision of humankind ranging over classic literature, ancient and modern, both Western and non-Western, from the dilemmas of modernity in Yeats, Eliot, Milosz, Bellow, Dostoevsky, to Lu Xun, Ryuichi Tamura, Kenzaburo Oe, Naguib Mahfouz, R. K. Narayan, among others, from mimesis and deconstruction to the United Nations, with extensive essays on Chinese, Japanese, and South-Asian literature. Clearly the work of a poet-critic attempting to embrace a larger portion of human experience than the personal postmodern self, The Grove of the Eumenides reaches toward an epic vision of the twenty-first century. All the muck and glory of American and international experience and history mix in the complex tension of a mind struggling with itself and its Age. Acutely perceptive of the spiritual and moral nuances of literature, criticism, and culture, Glaysher confronts the loss of religious faith in the modern world and breaks through to a vision of the unity of the human longing for transcendence.

Twenty years in the making, beyond Postmodernism, Into the Ruins confronts much of the human experience left out of the balance by postmodern poetry, often compared to the Alexandrians and the Neoterics, when writers similarly concentrated on the minor themes of personal life, while ignoring the challenging experience of the public realm. Suffused with a global tragic vision, into the ruins of the 20th Century, Glaysher has his gaze fixed firmly on the 21st. FROM the Preface:"The work of such artists as Francisco Goya in his war paintings and Los Caprichos, Kaethe Kollwitz's drawings, Wilfred Owen's poems of WWI, Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," and many of the poems of Robert Hayden, a fellow Detroiter, were powerful examples and influences on me that spoke to my sense of life and helped open the way forward for me as a poet."

Peter Marsh, an academic philosopher weighs modern life in a conversation with his friend, David Emerson, a businessman. Brought together after long separation by the brutal murder of Mary, Peter's wife, a time of devastating loss and crisis, their friendship inspires a dark night of the soul, during which Peter's meditations range over several hundred years of philosophy, politics, religion, social change, the dilemmas of existence, evoking a vision of the complexities of the 21st Century, the United Nations, and global governance.Structured around classical Greek choral movements, the first section ponders themes from Japanese Buddhism, while the second and third survey Western philosophy from Aristotle and Plato through Descartes, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Derrida, and others, in a powerfully dramatic grappling with philosophy, East and West.¿¿

The essays and reviews of Frederick Glaysher's The Myth of the Enlightenment were all written during the 21st Century, with many of them written during his evolving intellectual and spiritual struggle to write his epic poem, The Parliament of Poets, the First Edition of which was published in late 2012. These essays open up Glaysher's own biography and his life-long interest in the writings of Leo Tolstoy, Rabindranath Tagore, John Milton, Saul Bellow,Robert Hayden,and other poets and writers, offering a fresh, new vision of literature and culture. In terms of his engagement with the writings of such philosophers and social thinkers as Plato, Giambattista Vico, Ibn Khaldun, Julien Benda, Pitirim Sorokin, Arnold Toynbee, and Jacques Barzun, Glaysher probes into the dilemmas of the Enlightenment and modernity, as he articulates a vision for the 21st Century beyond postmodernism, favoring neither East nor West,but truly global and universal. In a number of reviews, Glaysher explores democracy in China, the United Nations, and what literature has too often become under the cultural tyranny of the radicalized American English department. In the final section, Race in America, Glaysher engages with his experience of growing up in Metropolitan Detroit and the dynamics of black and white race relations, suggesting, for the 21st Century,a wider conception of who we Americans are. Provocative, calling to account endemic complacencies, The Myth of the Enlightenment reassesses our underlying cultural assumptions, looking forward with hope toward a deeper understanding of Democratic pluralism and universality, for our nation and the globe.From the PrefaceFor over three-hundred years, civilization has been under the sway of the Myth of the Enlightenment. While the Enlightenment initiated a highly beneficial movement away from autocratic government and religion, a stifling reliance on past authorities, accompanied by an ever-increasing scientific and practical development, very early on stress and cracks began to be felt in the structure of the psyche and society. The twentieth century witnessed those cracks transmogrifying into crevasses of gaping and violent proportions, often circling the globe. The last few decades have borne all the more testimony that the Myth of the Enlightenment has become part of the problem and no longer sufficiently comprises what is needed to resolve and heal what civilization is suffering from.

The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem takes place partly on the moon, at the Apollo 11 landing site, the Sea of Tranquility, and around the world.Apollo, the Greek god of poetry, calls all the poets of the nations, ancient and modern, East and West, to assemble on the moon to consult on the meaning of modern life. The Parliament of Poets sends the main character, the Poet of the Moon, on a Journey to the seven continents to learn from all of the spiritual and wisdom traditions of humankind. On Earth and on the moon, the poets teach a global, universal celebration of life.One of the major themes is the power of women and the female spirit across cultures. Another is the nature of science and religion, including Quantum Physics, as well as the "two cultures," science and the humanities.All the great shades appear at the Apollo 11 landing site in the Sea of Tranquility: Homer and Virgil from the Greek and Roman civilizations; Dante, Spenser, and Milton hail from the Judeo-Christian West; Rumi, Attar, and Hafez step forward from Islam; Du Fu and Li Po, Basho and Zeami, step forth from China and Japan; the poets of the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana meet on that plain; griots from Africa; shamans from Indonesia and Australia; Murasaki Shikibu, Emily Dickinson, and Jane Austen, poets and seers of all Ages, bards, rhapsodes, troubadours, and minstrels, major and minor, hail across the halls of time and space.That transcendent Rose symbol of our age, the Earth itself, viewed from the heavens, one world with no visible boundaries, metaphor of the oneness of the human race, reflects its blue-green light into the blackness of the starry universe.