William Quotes - page 11
"Sixty years ago Catholics played a prominent, prestigious, and irreplaceable part in American literary culture...They included established fiction writers--Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Walker Percy, J. F. Powers, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Horgan, Jack Kerouac, Julien Green, Pietro di Donato, Hisaye Yamamoto, Edwin O'Connor, Henry Morton Robinson, and Caroline Gordon. (Sociologist Father Andrew Greeley had yet to try his formidable hand at fiction.)...also science fiction and detective writers such as Anthony Boucher, Donald Westlake, August Delerth, and Walter Miller, Jr."...in American poetry...Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, Kenneth Rexroth, John Berryman, Isabella Gardner, Phyllis McGinley, Claude McKay, Dunstan Thompson, John Frederick Nims, Brother Antoninus (William Everson), Thomas Merton, Josephine Jacobsen, and the Berrigan brothers, Ted and Daniel.... There were even Catholic haiku poets, notably Raymond Roseliep and Nick Virgilio" (15-16).
Dana Gioia
It is significant, as William Vaughan remarks in his introduction to Borsch-Supan's catalogue, that churches never appear in Friedrich's work except in the distance, as unreal visions, or as ruins. The visible Church is dead, only the invisible Church, in the heart or revealed through Nature, is alive. This is part of Friedrich's Pietist heritage, a personal religion that refuses all outward forms, all doctrine. To put a landscape on an altar is an aggressive act, as destructive of the old forms as it is creative of a new sensibility.
Caspar David Friedrich