Monday, June 18, 2018
"A Parliament of Poets"––by Frederick Glasher
"A Parliament of Poets" by Frederick Glasher
The following book is an astonishment. In it, the author creates an imaginary collection of earlier poets on the moon. They are there to expose the fallacies of modern technology that takes away the sacred quality of the moon and other aspects of our world. To do this, he utilizes a cast of characters well known from literary history and gathered from the many traditions of the world, including the great writers of the Western classics, many major poets of the East, and such additional sources as shamanism of various cultures, including South America and Africa.
The result is a brilliant work by a learned and skillful author who relies on twenty years of dedication to the wisdom literature of the various traditions to set against the materialistic focus of modern science and technology. He utilizes the form of the classic epic as seen in such master story tellers as Homer and Virgil. One of his primary symbols is the moon itself, long a favorite love object of poets of all eras, now littered with debris left behind by the astronauts in their scientific explorations of its surface.
He calls his central character simply "the Protagonist" and compares him facetiously to Cervantes' Don Quixote, the foolish knight who went forth on his comical steed to tilt at windmills. Thus the author is both humorous and profound, for he deals with a topic that is primary to our recovery of the numinous quality of human experience, but does it without meaningless bluster and pomp.
Since I spent years studying the writers of the classical tradition, this literary journey was for me a walk down memory lane. I enjoyed it immensely for it spoke to many of my own concerns. Some readers will not relate to the authors he mentions, but I think that they may still gain a great deal from exploring this text. He reminds us that literacy in the finest sense is a primary element in our human endeavor.
You can sample this volume by looking it up on Amazon and clicking "See inside" there. You will then have access to a significant portion of the text and get a fuller sense of what this brilliant work is all about.
Some may wonder what this book has to do with Kundalini and spiritual transformation. For me, it represents a valuable step in the direction of awakening, for such reflections are what we can learn to prepare us for the next level, when feeling and personal experience are paramount as we "make our soul" (Yeats).
The Parliament of Poets: An Epic Poem
by Frederick Glaysher (Author)
