Description:
William Franke wrote these poems full of youthful inspirations in lyrical verse in the 1980s after completing an MA degree in philosophy and theology at Oxford University. Leaving Oxford, he embarked in the summer of 1980 on the "grand tour" of Europe in the tradition of British aristocrats from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. He followed the footsteps of the archetypal French vagabond poet, Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891). Sojourning in Italy among young Italian friends, he learned Italian by total immersion like a child. The poems are situated mostly in Italy and France--which he continued to traverse as he hitchhiked across the continent. His life as an itinerant poet concluded when he returned to the US to teach and eventually entered a doctoral program in comparative literature (PhD, Stanford, 1991). The poems record challenging worldly experiences being processed through religious reflection to forge a personal spiritual vision. They are a testament of personal growth in consciousness mediated by literature.
Brief description: William Franke is a philosopher of the humanities and a professor of comparative literature at Vanderbilt University. He has also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Macao (2013-2016); Fulbright-University of Salzburg Distinguished Chair in Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religion; and an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung research fellow. His single-authored books have been published by the university presses of Chicago, Stanford, Cambridge, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Ohio State, and the State University of New York. For his books in 2021, he was awarded the
Hermes Award: Book of the Year in Phenomenological Hermeneutics, Agora Hermeneutica, The International Institute for Hermeneutics (IIH), 2021