Overview

William Franke wrote these poems full of youthful inspirations in lyrical verse in the 1980s after completing an MA degree in philosophy and theology at Oxford University. Leaving Oxford, he embarked in the summer of 1980 on the ""grand tour"" of Europe in the tradition of British aristocrats from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He followed the footsteps of the archetypal French vagabond poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Sojourning in Italy among young Italian friends, he learned Italian by total immersion like a child. The poems are situated mostly in Italy and France--which he continued to traverse as he hitchhiked across the continent. His life as an itinerant poet concluded when he returned to the US to teach and eventually entered a doctoral program in comparative literature (PhD, Stanford, 1991). The poems record challenging worldly experiences being processed through religious reflection to forge a personal spiritual vision. They are a testament of personal growth in consciousness mediated by literature.

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Reviews

""The Vagabond Scholar is wisdom transposed into infinite texture and oceanic memory. It is consummate and ineluctable poetry made of intimacies and images compressing time and place, sheltering the deep and pure. Here we find perfect words beneath sunlit words formed from motion and music. William Franke's poetry excavates the interior mercies that beckon bodies to be embraced. This collection is a gift of companioning, of that exquisite and sacred seal uniting mind and heart."" --Caitlin Smith Gilson, Professor of Philosophy, St. Vincent de Paul Regional Seminary ""William Franke wrote these lyrics on the cusp of his doctoral studies, as he finished a master's degree at Oxford and then traveled through continental Europe. Collected here for the first time, these poems reveal how the 'inward hours' of study and the vivid experiences of life abroad shaped one of the great humanists of our day."" --Steven Knepper, author of Wonder Strikes: Approaching Aesthetics and Literature with William Desmond ""William Franke's writing, even in its academic mode, has always been poetic because it has always concerned itself with what animates but never finalizes itself within language. That Franke has been writing poetry his whole career is no surprise. Here we get a collection of early poems written on the move that anticipate, and perhaps unsay, all the later academic work. Beyond speech, there is silence, and beyond silence, there is poetry."" --Peter Kline, Associate Professor of Systematic Theology, St Francis College, University of Divinity

Author Information

William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities, a Dante scholar, and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. The author of numerous books at the intersection of literature, philosophy, and theology, he lectures and gives seminars on his apophatic philosophy, with a focus on the revelatory power of poetic language, in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish on five continents.

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