Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment

Holy Fire: Nine Visionary Poets and the Quest for Enlightenment by Halpern, Daniel. Hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780060182403.

Since the beginning of time, poets have been absorbed by the quest for signs that our lives have greater spiritual significance than the simple sum of our labors on earth. The deceptive simplicity of the Sufi poet Rumis musings, Romantic poet William Blakes riveting map of heaven and hell, the self-destructive Arthur Rimbauds thirst for the extremes of human experience, and the sometimes ecstatic, often heartrending Celtic vision of William Butler Yeats, among others, attest to this enduring poetic search. In Holy Fire, editor Daniel Halpern has collected the work of nine poets whose writing has shaped our modern view of the sacred. William Blake, Hart Crane, William Butler Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Arthur Rimbaud, and Allen Ginsberg are included here, as well as lesser-known but equally important writers, such as Jelaluddin Rumi, the fourteenth-century Kashmiri poet Lalla, and the sixteenth-century Hindu mystic Mirabai.