Overview

In this unique and compelling book, the author examines side by side the works of Eastern mystical philosophers and poets and some of their Western counterparts, not attempting to assimilate them to each other, but rather to observe what sparks of insight fly when their writings are brought into alignment. He focuses throughout on their various conceptions of the imagination and, more broadly, of consciousness itself. In the first part of the book, he reads the work of the great American Modernist poet Wallace Stevens, using as a framework the philosophy and aesthetics of Abhinavagupta, a tenth-century Kashmiri philosopher and mystic. In subsequent parts, he goes on to explore affinities between a wide range of Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Sufi philosophers and poets and a number of Western authors, focusing in particular on Blake, Keats, and Shelley. In prose both clear and seductively lyrical, the author invites the reader to explore spiritual, intellectual, and aesthetic vistas, at first no doubt unfamiliar, in which he or she gradually becomes more and more at home. Throughout Some Segments of a River, the author's aim is to open up these vistas and to stir the reader's own intuitive and imaginative powers--powers that are applicable to any endeavor and that quite simply, in the words of Wallace Stevens, ""help us to lead our lives.""

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9780981863696

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George Franklin graduated from Harvard University in 1975, where he studied poetry with Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Fitzgerald. He subsequently received an MFA in creative writing from Brown University, and an MA in English literature from Columbia University. He lived for over ten years in the ashrams of his spiritual preceptor in India and in upstate New York, where he developed a keen interest in Kashmir Shaivism. He has published two books of poetry, The Fall of Miss Alaska (Six Gallery Press, 2007) and the chapbook Contour with Shadow (Frolic Press, 2016). A forthcoming book will be published by Ristretto Press. His uncollected poems, including ""Talking Head,"" a forty-page poem in blank verse, have been published widely, most prominently in Epiphany Magazine and in The Recorder, the Journal of the American Irish Historical Society. He had the honor of serving as editorial assistant to the great scholar and pandit of Kashmir Shaivism, Debarata Sensharma, on his translation of and commentary on Abhinavagupta's Paramarthasara.

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