Art''s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime

The collection Arts Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime was inspired by T. S. Eliots observation in his Dante (1929): The experience of a poem is the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime. There is a first, or an early moment which is unique, which can never be forgotten, but is never repeated integrally; and yet which would become destitute of significance if it did not survive in a larger whole of experience. In this collection, scholars and artists from a variety of fields speak in personal terms, but with what one has called intellectual passion, of a work of art (poem, play, novel, film, visual art, among others) that, as Dante suggest, has had an immediate effect on them (the Visionary Moment from the title) yet survives in a larger whole of experience (that Last a Lifetime in the collections sub-title). Some of the titles of essays already submitted show the range of this inquiry: Conversations with the Dead; Playing Richard III: The Experience of a Moment and a Lifetime; Picassos Three Musicians; Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great; Pleasant Dreaming with Thanatopsis; From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeares Winters Tale; Fight the Power Spike Lees Visionary Moment; and Plastic Art Moment.