Walking with Ruskin: Poems (Notable Voices) - Softcover

In his poem, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," William Blake hypothesized that "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite." Of course, Blake's "doors of perception" are both hard to clean and even harder to keep clean. For John Ruskin, the famous 19th century art and social critic, seeing demanded a scientist's respect for fact, but also a love for what was being seen. These poems ask us to attend, with devotion and care, to a world which will always remain a mystery, but a mystery in which love calls us to the things of this world where we may become most fully human.

Robert Cording teaches English and Creative Writing at the College of the Holy Cross where he is the Barrett Professor of Creative Writing. He has published five collections of poems: Life-list, which won the Ohio State University Press Journal Award in 1987; What Binds Us to This World (Copper Beach Press, 1991); Heavy Grace (Alice James, 1991), Against Consolation (Cavankerry Press, 2002); Common Life (Cavankerry Press, 2006). He has received two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and two from the Connecticut Commission of the Arts. In 1992, he was poet-in-residence at the Frost Place in Franconia, New Hampshire. His poems have appeard in the Nation, Image, AGNI, The Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, New England Review, Poetry, DoubleTake, Orion, Paris Review, The New Yorker and many other magazines. He lives in Woodstock, Connecticut with his wife and three children.