John O'Meara

Looking ahead to the 250th anniversary of Wordsworths birth, this small book challenges fresh questions about where Wordsworth stood in his poetic production in the great years of creative ferment between 1798 and 1806. Numerous poems are covered from this period, but especially does this book re-think our traditional conception of the relationship between The Prelude and Intimations. Wordsworth is separated from the visionary life he once knew by the interdictive effects of his obsession with The Recluse, the great philosophical poem he never finished. In the meantime he takes up with The Prelude but the essential Wordsworth remains the one who, in Intimations, turns his attention back, yearningly, to the visionary gleam. With The Prelude the epic poet comes through, but Wordsworth the visionary poet is lost, and it concerns him all the more now that he feels he faces death and a new darkness, the darkness of the grave, without the life that he once knew.

This Life, This Death: Wordsworth’S Poetic Destiny

Recent translations of Novalis’s work into English should occasion fresh endeavours in the field of Novalis studies, aimed at English readers who are without German. In this book John O’Meara presents his own understanding of what Novalis offers to these readers, who have been given firmer access to his life and to his philosophical works than ever before. O’Meara traces Novalis’s philosophical development meticulously, finishing up with an in-depth analysis of his Hymns to the Night, the Spiritual Songs, and his main and unfinished novel, Henry von Ofterdingen. Emphasis is on the process by which Novalis’s literary works manifest as direct expressions of his philosophical explorations, which bear fruit, eventually, in visions of sweeping majesty and annunciatory grandeur.

An Exposition on the Process of His Achievement

The Way of Novalis

How can we know the great Goddess again? How worthy are we of that mythical experience? How are we related to that experience in our deepest depravity? And why has the mythical experience grown so opaque to us in our post-Romantic, modern world? These are the main issues arising out of Western literary tradition that John O’Meara explores in this book. In the work of Robert Graves, Shakespeare, and Keats, O’Meara sees the deepest expression at once of our most far-reaching hopes and our sadly alienated case in respect of any mythical experience we may conceive of having in the immediate future.

Graves, Shakespeare, Keats

MYTH, DEPRAVITY, IMPASSE

In these essays, John O'Meara re-assesses both the tragic limitations and inherent promise of Romantic tradition in the interpretation of Shakespeare. The philosophical theory of Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, is brought forward as consummating that tradition. Building on concepts which Anthroposophy supplies O'Meara proceeds to a fresh reading of Shakespeare's work. A wide range of plays is covered from Richard II to The Tempest, with special focus on Othello and King Lear. The endings of these plays, O'Meara sees as pivotal to Shakespeare's evolution into a final phase prophetic of the Romantic experience to come which Steiner fulfils.

Essays on Shakespeare and Romantic Tradition

Othello's Sacrifice

This book presents an in-depth view of the extraordinary revisionist language Shakespeare gives to his most royal of all kings, from the time Richard falls dramatically out of favor with God. Readers will find this book most useful in seeking to disentangle the play's notoriously elaborate verbal presentation, but what the author brings out in connection with Richard's approach to language should move performers themselves to seek to present in future a more creatively dynamic Richard than the one we have thus far been required to accept. Especially does this book help one to see more clearly how before Shakespeare's difficult re-emergence in his late plays, before all the tragedy, before the fall, there was—God. "John O'Meara's...work...displays an alert and delicate sensitivity to language and metaphor..." Arthur Kinney, English Language Notes Cover Photo: by RegWilson © The Royal Shakespeare Company Alan Howard as Richard II in the 1980 Royal Shakespeare Company Production at Stratford-Upon-Avon Back Photo by A.F.

Shakespeare's Richard Ii, God, and Language

In part through critical biography, in part through a close reading of The Book of Hours as well as many poems from his Diaries, this volume challenges new ideas about what went into the making of Rilke in the early period of his association with Lou Salomé. The Diaries Rilke wrote between 1898 and 1900 are examined in great depth to show that behind the grand story of his poetic emergence lies the fundamental reality of his repression by Lou and what this would sow by way of a sublimated achievement as sublimely poignant as it is finally tragic.

The Early Development as Prototype of the Later

Rilke in the Making, Volume 1: A Poet's Fall from Grace (1897-1905)

Giraldus (Cambrensis)

Depicts the geography and wildlife of Ireland and describes the history and social life of the country during the Middle Ages

The History and Topography of Ireland

The following collection of essays could have had as a subtitleTowards a New Sophiology. Apart from the final essay, “Valentin Tomberg and Dostoevski,” all the other essays appeared (in this same order) as articles in the Starlight Journal of the Sophia Foundation of North America over the years 2014-2019. The production of these articles took place during the period that immediately followed the publication of O’Meara’s book, The Way of Novalis, and should be seen as an outgrowth from the Sophianic direction of that book. In these essays, slightly expanded from the articles, O’Meara elaborates on the Sophianic mission of the Foundation with reference to the main Master-Individualities to whom the Foundation has linked itself, notably Rudolf Steiner, Valentin Tomberg, Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), as well as the Master Peter Deunov. However, other well-known individuals are also considered in some depth, including Vladimir Solovyov, Pavel Florensky, Sergius Bulgakov, Fyodor Dostoevski, Carl Jung, as well as some of the Master-artists of the Renaissance, most notably Michelangelo and da Vinci. Estelle Isaacson and Ita Wegman also assume a significant role in this collection.

The 'Starlight' Essays on the Masters of Wisdom

'The Riddle of the Sophia' and Other Essays

No other book on Hamlet has yet to consider the way in which the play in its four major aspects of Sorrow, Sexuality, Revenge, and Death, consistently reflects the otherworldly direction of Hamlet's thought and experience ... the elegant and subtle prose lends force and dignity to the argument ... a remarkable and provocative contribution to Shakespeare Studies. {Corona Sharp, English Studies in Canada}

John O'Meara

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