Publisher's Synopsis
"To challenge the (self-)alienating and disempowering effects of ideology-driven illusions, Rich Murphy's often provocative voice blends three dominant streams of enquiry: updating and re-affirming the old Blakean ideal of "Giving a body to Falsehood"; advocating a post-symbolic kind of poetic fashioning that favors only temporary patterns of understanding over fixed and inherited cultural associations; and passionately defending the right to a literary/philosophical education as well as the formative role of poetry and the arts on the path to overcoming our self-made or internalized mental prisons. Contemplating the contingencies of the future, the essays collected here may no longer share the confidence of Walt Whitman's "So Long!", but they nevertheless hold on to its announcement of "a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold." Therefore, whether one agrees or disagrees with some of Murphy's challenging ideas, his essay
