The collection Art’s Visionary Moment: Personal Encounters with Works That Last a Lifetime was inspired by T. S. Eliot’s 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 collection’s 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”; “Picasso’s ‘Three Musicians’”; “Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great”; “Pleasant Dreaming with ‘Thanatopsis’”; “From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale”; “Fight the Power” Spike Lee’s Visionary Moment”; and “Plastic Art Moment.”

Sidney Homan is Professor of English at the University of Florida and author or editor of some twenty-two books on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights. He is also a director and actor in professional and university theatres.

Anthem symploke Studies in Theory

CONTENTS; Acknowledgements; Introduction: “What work of art has stayed with you--and why?”; Sidney Homan; Section One: “Changes in Attitude”; 1.  Poetry Meets Power: Tamburlaine the Great; Frederick Kiefer; 1. From Madness to Miracle: An Encounter with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale; June Schlueter; 2. The Prison of Chillon; Donna Soto-Morettini; 3. Being All You Can’t Be: Robinson Crusoe as a Communist of One; Mike Hill; Section Two: The Medium Is Indeed the Message; 4. Marlowe’s Changing Line: Repetition, Poetry, and the Stage; S. P. Cerasano; 5. Playing Richard III: The Experience of a Moment and a Lifetime; Sidney Homan; 6.“If Only It Were Possible.” Time in Uncle Vanya’s Timeless Legacy; Avra Sidiropoulou; 7. Plastic Art Moment; Ranjan Ghosh; Section Three: Companions on a Journey; 8. Conversations with the Dead; Lawrence Quill; 9. Fight the Power: Spike Lee’s Visionary Moment; Jeffrey Di Leo; 10. “Nekyia”: The Homeric Passage to Hades; Elizabeth Sakellaridou; 11.Picasso’s “Three Musicians”; Henry Sussman; 12. Why Kitchens Matter: Re-visiting Renée’s Wednesday to Come; David O’Donnell; 13.“And a Little Bit Not”; Gina Mackenzie; Section Four: Very Personal Encounters; 15. Two for One; Daniel O’Hara; 16. Listening to James Baldwin; Daniel Nutters; 17. Keats’s Nightingale and Other Nightingales; Caroline Rooney; 18. Oliver!; Josh Marsh; 19. Pleasant Dreaming with “Thanatopsis”; Jerry Harp; 20. Lucky; Ralf Remshardt; 21. “It’s Okay Now”: Sending Myself Postcards from the Edge; MJ Robinson; Epilogue: Something of Great Constancy; Sidney Homan