What a wonderful world Patrick White takes us into in this remaking of the Australian social landscape in line with his own prophetic ambition to re-sacralize a spiritually desolate land. As he says in his essay “The Prodigal Son”: Because the void I had to fill was so immense, I wanted to try to suggest…
Tag: Marriage of Heaven and Hell
William Blake and Patrick White
Patrick White was clearly deeply influenced by William Blake. Not only does his novel Riders in the Chariot (arguably his most radical religious novel) begin with a core quote about the power of the prophetic imagination from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, but White’s obsession with explicitly exploring the transformative power of art, of literature is central…
Art & Spirit
This week in all our units we have been exploring the relationship between Art (poetry, painting, prose, music…) and that part of human nature that is termed Spirit. For William Blake and for D.H.Lawrence the division between Body and Spirit -central to many religious traditions- was something they wanted to challenge. As Blake pronounced in…
