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Taking its title from a poem of William Butler Yeats, this collection of essays focuses on "Adam’s Curse"—the burdens and harsh conditions that, as Denis Donoghue underscores throughout, make any human achievement difficult. As he says, those "conditions include at various levels of reference the Fall of Man, categorical failure, loss, the limitations inscribed so insistently in human life that they seem to be in the nature of things, like death and weather." But hope is never ruled out, as Donoghue reminds us of "the possibility of putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account."
It is the "putting up with the conditions and turning them to some account"—a post-lapsarian struggle fraught with religious questions—that most interests Donoghue. These essays, which are explorations of both faith and literary works that engage faith, address a dazzling range of texts and writers: Yeats, Milton, Larkin, Heaney, Emmanuel Levinas, Alasdair MacIntyre, John Crowe Ransom, Henry Adams, William Lynch’s Christ and Apollo, and Robert Bellah’s Beyond Belief, among others. Common to all is an alertness to the social bearing of literature and the role it plays in relation to politics, religion, and especially ethics. What emerges, for Donoghue, is the need to restore the primacy of theology and church doctrine without evading the "dark parts" of the Old and New Testaments.
Through his probing, reflective encounters with philosophical and religious issues, we witness a magisterial intelligence at work.
“Donoghue delivered these eight pieces as lectures in March and April 2000 and doesn’t claim they are comprehensive or ‘even consecutive’ on their subject. Instead of a systematic philosophical treatise, they are a series loosely woven around a title borrowed from Yeats and directed by a ‘governing prejudice’ attributed to Coleridge—that ‘a fall of some sort or other ... is the fundamental postulate of the moral history of man.’ Donoghue sees himself going against the grain, reflecting on those two vagabonds, religion and literature, in the none-too-easy works of Emmanuel Levinas, Wallace Stevens, Robert Bellah, Alasdair McIntyre, Czeslaw Milosz, Seamus Heaney, and Charles Baudelaire. His is an appropriate stance for a critic, though in the end its tone is as defensive as it is critical. He richly explores an impressive range of writings as he defends the transcendence of analogy as opposed to the immanence of metaphor. Agreeing with him isn’t necessary to benefit from traveling with him through the literary landscape he surveys.” —Booklist, March 2001
Denis Donoghue is Henry James Professor of English and American Letters and University Professor at New York University. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Words Alone: The Poet T. S. Eliot (2000), The Practice of Reading (1998), and Walter Pater: Lover of Strange Souls (1995).