Tongues Of Fallen Angels

Selden Rodman's Tongues of Fallen Angels is a collection of conversations with twelve ranking authors, leading men of letters in the Western Hemisphere, with accompanying informal photographs. From Spanish America: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the late Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. From Brazil: Vinicius de Moraes and Joan Cabral de Melo Neto. From Trinidad: the poet-playwright Derek Walcott. From the United States: Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg. Ernest Hemingway, Stanley Kunitz, and Norman Mailer. An impressive list, and all the more so given Rodman's remarkable power to give human substance to figures whose everyday words have been generally ignored in favor of their writings and other public pronouncements. When Rodman's Conversations With Artists appeared in 1957, it aroused a storm of controversy, intentionally polemical, it became a storm center in the battles then raging in the art world. Rodman's journals also contained records of fiery bouts with novelists and poets of stature. He was urged at the time to publish them, but refrained, preferring to wait for a book of a different, more empathic intent, in putting together Tongues of Fallen Angels, Rodman--the editor of such seminal anthologies as One Hundred British Poets and One Hundred American Poems--forcefully asserts the essential social role of the creator. ''The minor poet," he declares, ''is primarily concerned with form or innovation; the major one uses these tools almost unconsciously to say something he feels he has to say--and which the world will be better for hearing."

Selden Rodman's Tongues of Fallen Angels is a collection of conversations with twelve ranking authors, leading men of letters in the Western Hemisphere, with accompanying informal photographs. From Spanish America: Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, the late Pablo Neruda, and Octavio Paz. From Brazil: Vinicius de Moraes and Joan Cabral de Melo Neto. From Trinidad: the poet-playwright Derek Walcott. From the United States: Robert Frost, Allen Ginsberg. Ernest Hemingway, Stanley Kunitz, and Norman Mailer. An impressive list, and all the more so given Rodman's remarkable power to give human substance to figures whose everyday words have been generally ignored in favor of their writings and other public pronouncements. When Rodman's Conversations With Artists appeared in 1957, it aroused a storm of controversy, intentionally polemical, it became a storm center in the battles then raging in the art world. Rodman's journals also contained records of fiery bouts with novelists and poets of stature. He was urged at the time to publish them, but refrained, preferring to wait for a book of a different, more empathic intent, in putting together Tongues of Fallen Angels, Rodman--the editor of such seminal anthologies as One Hundred British Poets and One Hundred American Poems--forcefully asserts the essential social role of the creator. ''The minor poet," he declares, ''is primarily concerned with form or innovation; the major one uses these tools almost unconsciously to say something he feels he has to say--and which the world will be better for hearing."

The Apostle Paul's reference to the "tongues of angels" (1 Cor 13.1) has always aroused curiosity, but it has rarely been the object of a history-of-traditions investigation. Few readers of Paul's words are aware of the numerous references and allusions to angelic languages in Jewish and Christian texts. John C. Poirier presents the first full-length study of the concept of angelic languages, and the most exhaustive attempt to assemble the evidence for that concept in ancient Jewish and early Christian texts. He discusses possible references to angelic languages in the New Testament, pseudepigraphic writings (both Jewish and Christian), the Dead Sea scrolls, rabbinic texts, patristic references, magical writings, and epigraphy. The discussion is divided between those witnesses that understand angels to speak Hebrew, and those that understand angels to speak an esoteric heavenly language.

A collection of the greatest sermons ever preached, this book fills an enormous gap in the spiritual literature of the contemporary world. Among its many contributors are St. Augustine, John Donne, Hildegard of Bingen, Martin Luther, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

This sequel to "Fallen Angels and the Origins of Evil" introduces Saint Germain and other great masters of East and West who deliver their prophecies for Aquarius revealing the role of fallen angels in economic upheaval, international terrorism, and more. "Fallen Angels Among Us" offers tremendous hope and a way to transmute and transcend the prophecies before us.

In this comparative and hybrid study, Reginald A. Wilburn offers the first scholarly work to theorize African American authors’ rebellious appropriations of Milton and his canon. Wilburn engages African Americans’ transatlantic negotiations with perhaps the preeminent freedom writer in the English tradition. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt contends that early African American authors appropriated and remastered Milton by completing and complicating England’s epic poet of liberty with the intertextual originality of repetitive difference. Wilburn focuses on a diverse array of early African American authors, such as Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Julia Cooper. He examines the presence of Milton in their works as a reflection of early African Americans’ rhetorical affiliations with the poet’s satanic epic for messianic purposes of freedom and racial uplift. Wilburn explains that early African American authors were attracted to Milton because of his preeminent status in literary tradition, strong Christian convictions, and poetic mastery of the English language. This tripartite ministry makes Milton an especially indispensible intertext for authors whose writings and oratory were sometimes presumed beneath the dignity of criticism. Through close readings of canonical and obscure texts, Wilburn explores how various authors rebelled against such assessments of black intellect by altering Milton’s meanings, themes, and figures beyond orthodox interpretations and imbuing them with hermeneutic shades of interpretive and cultural difference. However they remastered Milton, these artists respected his oeuvre as a sacred yet secular talking book of revolt, freedom, and cultural liberation. Preaching the Gospel of Black Revolt particularly draws upon recent satanic criticism in Milton studies, placing it in dialogue with methodologies germane to African American literary studies. By exposing the subversive workings of an intertextual Middle Passage in black literacy, Wilburn invites scholars from diverse areas of specialization to traverse within and beyond the cultural veils of racial interpretation and along the color line in literary studies.