Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892 – 1950 )

Into the golden vessel of great song
Let us pour all our passion; breast to breast
Let other lovers lie, in love and rest;
Not we, — articulate so, but with the tongue
Of all the world.
Edna St. Vincent Millay

Edna St. Vincent Millay was a Dionysian of passion who symbolized the “New Woman” at the end of the First World War. However, she wrote largely in the most controlled of poetic forms, the sonnet.  read more »

Poem by Cindy Sparrow

How clear is the vision!
How it sends waves of Peace throughout the world, riding on the smoke of incense and the sound of bells!
How warm and free it makes you feel inside.

You are standing in a beautiful place, thinking thoughts of Peace.
Reach out your left hand and join hands with another Peace Seeker.
Reach out with your right hand, you will find another Seeker.
These Peace Seekers on your left and right also join hands with others, and they with others still.
On and on, we join hands and send thoughts of peace, compassion and oneness.  read more »

by Rene Wadlow

William Blake
Who beat upon the Wall
Till Truth obeyed his call.
W.B. Yeats

“There have been men who loved the future like a mistress, and the future mixed her breath into their breath and shook her hair about them and hid them from understanding of their times. William Blake was one of these men, and if he spoke confusedly and obscurely it was because he spoke of things for whose speaking he could find no models in the world he knew.”  read more »

by Rene Wadlow

In a world where there is both appreciation and fear of the mixing of cultural traditions, Maurice Béjart was always a champion of blending cultural influences. He was a world citizen of culture and an inspiration to all who work for a universal culture. His death on 22 November 2007 will be a loss, but he serves as a forerunner of what needs to be done so that beauty will overcome the walls of separation. There is a certain symbolism that his death comes on the eve of the Israel-Palestine conference in Annapolis where some steps may be taken toward Middle East peace. One of the Béjart’s most impressive dance sequences was Jérusalem, cité de la Paix in which he stressed the need for reconciliation and mutual cultural enrichment.  read more »

(Fifth in a series by Rene Wadlow)
Tagore Today

The darkness of egoism which will have to be destroyed is the egoism of the Nation.  The ideal of India is against the intense consciousness of the separateness of one’s own people from others, which inevitably leads to ceaseless conflicts.  There my prayer is ‘let India stand for the co-operation of all the people of the world’.  read more »

(#4 in a series by Rene Wadlow)
W.H. Auden: Poet of the Age of Anxiety

Wystan Hugh Auden, whose birth 100 years ago in 1907, is marked this year by two separate groups of poetry readers.  Each group celebrates half of his poetic life and rather tries to forget about the other half, seeing one part of his life as the perfect image of the modern poet who lost his way.  read more »

(third in a series by Rene Wadlow)

Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)

I am neither Christian, nor Jew, nor Gabr, nor Moslem. I am not of the East, nor the West, nor the land, nor the sea… My place is the Placeless, my trace is the Traceless.  read more »

(second in a series by Rene Wadlow )

G.W. Russell. “The highest minds building one upon another”  read more »

(#1 in a series by Rene Wadlow)

The Classical Greek writer Sophocles called Dionysus “the god of many names”, and Dionysus has been associated with the arts of civilization and with drama, and under his form as Bacchus with wine as liberating and rhapsodic. Friedrich Nietzsche saw Dionysus as the bringer of divine ecstasy, the restorer of the instinctive, unconscious unity of all life, a symbol of the periodic need of release from the rational and the common place, a return to the springs of life through the emotions. While Dionysus is associated with the vine and fertility, his main function is to teach that the soul is beyond time and space and seeks rapturous union with the divine.  read more »