George Bernard Shaw Selected Plays and Prefaces

"Shaw saw himself and his dramatic translation of the Nietzschian Superman as the Modern and secularized realization of the ancient concept of poet-creator. He believed (as did Blake, Emerson, and Nietzsche) that the poet-creator had a genius which was the spiritual source of Vision and a Will-to-Power and that these two human faculties, in a Marxist-utopian sense, held the hope of humanity. The poet's quest into the unknown, as Shaw believed, begins with a revolutionary renunciation of inherited duty and worn illusions in order to find the freedom to create a new order of being. The poet's imagination will be the guide. The poet as prophet must herald the new state of being into words, and sometimes deeds: "To desire, to imagine, to will, to create ... in one word, to conceive." The poet's gift is a state of vision and the wherewithal and will to bring that Vision into being before the greater consciousness of humanity."--Cover.