The Wayward Thomist

<p>John Martin Finlay was a poet and essayist critically acclaimed but little known during his short life. A Catholic convert but also an early victim of the AIDS virus he wrote his greatest work while under a death sentence struggling to cultivate an intellect modeled after his masters Yvor Winters Allen Tate and Saint Thomas Aquinas. In this first-ever full-length study of Finlay's life and work James Matthew Wilson guides us through Finlay's career as scholar and poet to introduce us to Finlay's compelling mind profound influences and rough-hewn masterpieces. We meet in these pages a Southern Agrarian austere classicist and wayward Thomist-a minor poet of major ambitions whom every American should read.</p><p></p><p></p><p>John Martin Finlay one of the most fascinating literary talents of the Eighties has remained criminally overlooked both by scholarship and the public-partly due to tragic personal circumstances partly due to his determination to put spiritual rigor before vapid fashionability. This volume is a noble and able effort to fill in this conspicuous chink in the canon. To do justice to the theologically fierce verse and criticism of Finlay requires not only a sensitivity to poetic craftsmanship but expertise across many subjects: Wintersian criticism Catholic doctrine Thomism Gnosticism Platonism Southern Literature and Western intellectual history-whose erudition but James Matthew Wilson's could rise to this challenge? And rise Wilson does providing an incisive painstakingly fair assessment of the life and work of this <em>poète maudit</em> who heroically strove to grasp a wholesome hypostatic vision of the world and thereby proved himself an exemplar for the progress of the modern soul.</p><p>-Elijah Blumov host of <em>Versecraft</em></p><p></p>