Art's Visionary Moment

<p>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.</p>