KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AUTHOR · HYMNS · BIBLE
Isaac Watts
Also known as: Isaac Watts, Watts, Isaac
Isaac Watts was an English Christian minister, hymnwriter, theologian and logician. A prolific and popular hymn writer, his work was part of evangelization. He was recognized as the "Father of English Hymnody", credited with some 750 hymns. Many of his hymns remain in use today and have been translated into numerous languages. Source: Wikipedia
Courage my soul, now learn to wield The weight of thine immortal shield.
— from Selected poems, 1990
Most acclaimed
Sermons on various subjects
"Amazing Grace" is a Christian hymn published in 1779 by the English clergyman John Newton in Olney, Buckinghamshire. With a message that forgiveness and redemption are possible regardless of the sins people commit and that the soul can be delivered from despair through the mercy of God, it is among the most sung and recorded hymns in the world and is especially popular in the United States, where it is used for both religious and secular purposes. Newton wrote the words from personal experience; he grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by others' reactions to what they took as his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed into service with the Royal Navy, and after leaving the service, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel so severely that he called out to God for mercy.
The Works
2003
"Lucas Cage can now lay claim to the only part of his father's enormous legacy that he ever craved - the disused old printing house hard by the Thames in London which he calls the Works. Lucas is determined that the inherent honesty of the silent building will never be betrayed. Special people - the people who need to be there - will be invited to share it with him: 'the family', as Lucas comes to call them." "Jamie Dear is one of those who grasps the opportunity to escape a small and nasty little flat he can ill afford and a wife who scorns his eagerness to be close to Lucas. Jamie emerges as a catalyst linking the lives of all the other disparate souls, while the calm and omniscient spirit of Lucas hovers above the interaction of relationships, sexual tensions and ambiguities."--BOOK JACKET.
Selected poems
1990
Charles Olson, the poet who coined the word post-modern and helped shape the generation that would emerge under its mantle, is known for the immense range of his intellectual and poetic reach. Here, in this selection by Robert Creeley, Olson's personal friend and literary ally, is the more "intimate order" of the poet who sought to embrace all of history and human thought. Olson came from working-class immigrant roots in a Massachusetts mill town. A scholar of profound originality and vision, he worked for Roosevelt's administration during the war years, then at Black Mountain, the prototypical experimental college and enclave of avantgarde writers and artists. In 1957 he settled in Gloucester, a town on the shore north of Boston where he had spent summers as a child. It was Gloucester, with its richness of history and human use, that provided the ground of The Maximus Poems, begun as letters some years before and which over the next two decades grew into a masterwork of epic dimensions. From the more than three hundred poems making up The Maximus Poems and the comparable number in Olson's Collected Poems, Creeley's selection makes available for the first time an essential sampling of Olson's poetry. Included are paradigmatic early works like "The Kingfishers," which Guy Davenport called "the most modern of American poems, the most energetically influential text in the last thirty-five years," as well as familiar pieces from Maximus like "Maximus, to Gloucester" and "Celestial Evening." Also represented are less known poems, such as "The chain of memory is resurrection" and "The Lamp," works that reveal a more personal side of this major American poet. Together these poems demonstrate Olson's genius and grace, a poet as at home in Gloucester as in the cosmos, a reckoner with dreams and myths, and "Western man at the limit of himself."