Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry encompasses the six lectures Jacques Maritain delivered as the inaugural lecturer in the A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Maritain focuses his vision on aesthetics, beauty, and the acts of inspiration and creation as they pertain to music, painting, and poetry. Addressing the implications of modernist art movements, the relations between modern poetry, beauty, and the "nonconceptual life of the intellect," and their surrounding themes, these lectures coalesce to paint a portrait of both Maritain's own philosophy and the debates surrounding art and meaning in the twentieth century as a whole. Raymond Hain's Introduction for the new edition provides an illuminating overview of Maritain's aesthetic philosophy and its diverse influences, including Humbert Clerissac, Charles Peguy, and Leon Bloy. Profound, difficult, and immensely rewarding, Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry belongs on the bookshelf of every true thinker.

Author Biography

Jacques Maritain (1882-1973) was perhaps the greatest Catholic philosopher of the twentieth century. A convert, along with his wife Raissa, from agnosticism to Catholicism, Maritain wrote extensively on metaphysics, aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, social and political philosophy, and the philosophy of history-all with the guiding inspiration of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. Raymond Hain is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Director of the Humanities Program at Providence College. He has published essays in various academic journals and books, including Christian Bioethics, The Thomist, and Human Nature, Contemplation, and the Political Order: Essays Inspired by Jacque Maritain's Scholasticism and Politics. He is the editor of Ethics and Culture: Essays in Honor of W. David Solomon.