BOOK REVIEWS 649 work will change some viewpoints of those who live in and with the culture of death. BASIL COLE, O.P. Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception Washington, D.C. Poetry, Beauty and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. By JOHN TRAPANI, JR. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Pp. 188. $32.00 (paper) ISBN: 978-0-8132-1825-0. “Let us tell her that there is an ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, Republic 10.607b). Ever since Plato there have been philosophers who have claimed that there is a war between philosophy and poetry. As Jacques Maritain suggests, philosophers often desire to pull away from the sensual world with their abstractions and theories. Among other things, like truth and goodness, they seek to learn, apart from their own concrete experience, how their concepts and theories might cohere with one another. The poet is decidedly different. He wishes to dwell in the land of the Heraclitean flux. He sits down in the sensual, the individual, the momentary and the transient. Hence, when any philosopher tries to write a philosophy of poetry, especially if he appreciates poetry, he may have a very divided mind. On the one hand, he wishes to appreciate and explore the depths of the inner being of individual persons, things, and their actual concrete existence in space and time, and on the other hand, he will want to extricate himself from these very same things in order to develop clear, abstract, timeless and universal principles concerning poetry. And these may seem to his poetical self as dry as dust. Indeed, as Maritain wrote in his Degrees of Knowledge and elsewhere, “The metaphysician breathes an atmosphere of abstraction which is death for the artist. Imagination, the discontinuous, the unverifiable, in which the metaphysician perishes, is life itself to the artist. They are playing seesaw, each in turn rising up to the sky.” Thus, there is a constant danger for the philosopher. He may, like the literary critic, wish to be closely bound to individual authors or texts, restrict his scope to them and so lose out on providing a properly philosophical benefit. Or the philosopher may, like the proverbial ivory-tower or armchair philosopher arranging abstractions, lose his real-life blood ties to individual works. In this work, John G. Trapani, Jr. has done a wonderful job of balancing this seesaw. On the one hand, he colorfully communicates his 650 BOOK REVIEWS insights into the unique influences upon Maritain’s life and work as well as illustrating Maritain’s own poetic insights. On the other hand, he has done the painstaking work of delineating the historical and ahistorical conceptual parameters of Maritain’s chief aesthetic concepts of poetry, beauty, and contemplation. In addition to conceptual charts diagramming the concepts of intuition and connaturality and in addition to the helpful summaries of Maritain’s thought, we are provided with, in effect, miniature philosophical lexicons delineating the major notions. And for those exploring Maritain’s aesthetics, these are invaluable. As there are now many Thomistic works on beauty and quite a few on Maritain’s aesthetics, some might ask what makes Trapani’s work unique. Several things are worth mentioning. First, his work on the history and conceptual parameters of the basic terms in Maritain’s aesthetics surpasses others in depth and quality. Take, for example, the terms of poetry and intuition. Trapani carefully shows their roots in Henri Bergson’s philosophy, causing the reader to want to read Bergson again. He traces the journey of these concepts from their inception in the later versions of Art and Scholasticism and Art and Faith—the correspondence with Jean Cocteau—to their emergence into full-fledged notions in The Situation of Poetry and Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry. Trapani tells us that we should not mix and match the terms of poetry and poetic knowledge because, as he cogently argues, poetry is ontologically prior to the latter. He makes us aware of the priority as he illumines Maritain’s famous definition of poetry in Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry as “that intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner...