Dinah Livingston Essay: Poetic Tales

KATABASIS

is pleased to announce its forthcoming title

POETIC TALES

Logosofia Down to Earth

a new prose book by

Dinah Livingstone

to be published on : 19th July 2010.

Prose. 150 pages. £9.95. ISBN 9780904872446

If we regard the whole supernatural realm of God or gods, angels and demons as the rich product of the human imagination, of what Blake called the poetic genius,. what value can such 'poetic tales' still have for us, once we have discarded the supernatural? The surprising answer is as much as ever. Not only does everyone, atheist or otherwise, need some theology, without which so much of our history and culture remains baffling, but when taken and sifted with what Coleridge called 'the willing suspension of disbelief, for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith', those tales are found to contain treasures of wisdom.

Poetic Tales is subtitled Logosofia Down to Earth. For more than twenty years Coleridge planned a major comprehensive work to be called Logosophia- - Word Wisdom -- but, for one reason or another, being Coleridge, he never got round to it. This book is not, of course, the one Coleridge would have written. Although its scope has a dash of Coleridgean ambition, it is more a train of thought than a treatise, combining a defence of poetry, a natural theology (with nothing supernatural about it), and a quest for kindness. After a chapter on the necessity of poetry, the book explores the central Christian story, not in order to add to the immense corpus of scholarship, but to ponder its enduring, purely natural, meaning and power.

This book offers a way into poetry even for the prosaic or merely puzzled, and a way into theology for atheists and all. God and the supernatural are human creations and these 'poetic tales' tell us a great deal about humanity.