Journals and Letters of Stephen Mackenna
by: Stephen Mackenna / E. R. Dodds /Padraic Colum (Editor)

Softcover. San Rafael CA, Coracle Press, reprint, 2007, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: None, Softcover, 330 pages, b&w frontis. A new printing of the journal and letters of Stephen Mackenna (1872-1934), a vivid and representative thinker whose life intersected with many of the leading figures of his day, and especially those of the Irish literary renaissance. The editor, E. R. Dodds, writes: Stephen MacKenna's working life was divided among three countries, and was further broken by two complete changes of occupation and by continual changes of residence. When he died, he left behind him no wife, child or lifelong friend; . . . and with the exception of the 1907-9 Journal no papers of any considerable biographical value. He left instead a legend. In the Memoir which follows I have endeavored to recover and present the facts underlying the legend. Best known for what AE (George William Russell) called his 'noble translation of Plotinus', MacKenna nonetheless harbored views that collided with those of Plotinus, and so speaks to us as an authentic forerunner of the 'modern' human being, by which is meant those who, once their individual inner light is lit-and no matter how it may gutter in the wind of uncertain freedoms-must, even while hallowing earlier and magisterial records of paths of spiritual ascent, accept the need for a complete 'descent' (without which the whole engine of creation will have had no final purpose), with all the provisional darkness this may entail, so that the final ascent may be made in personal love and freedom. Clean, bright copy.