We sometimes think a dawn of meaning or discovery brings answers to a restless, questioning mind. But often it opens new vistas and sometimes boundless ones. Then life’s streams and seas lift us bodily, offer glimpses of worlds too strange to know and sounds of grief or celebration. This is the tangled and alluring place in which our lives are found, bound in wonders, urgent and captivating. Here we find the vital ebb and flow of world as it dawns, new and mobile, ageless and weathered. This is an inward morning, a home in wilderness. As Henry Bugbee has it,...

After weighing my words carefully, I do not hesitate to say that my encounter with the thought and personality of Henry Bugbee will prove to have been a noteworthy event in my life. This encounter is reminiscent of my discovery more than forty years ago of the major work of another American, W. E. Hocking, to whom, with Henri Bergson, I was led to dedicate myMetaphysical Journal.

When I read Hocking’sThe Meaning of God in Human Experiencefor the first time, I had as yet published almost nothing. This book helped to turn me in the direction of...

In the chapter of hisAutobiographyentitled “Projective Verse,” William Carlos Williams has recorded the notion that in the writing of poem one perception must move instantly on another; also “form never more than an extension of content.”¹ Now for me philosophy is in the end an approximation to the poem, “a structure built upon own ground. . . , your ground where you stand on your own feet,” as he later speaks of the poem in the same book.² He also quotes a sentence from John Dewey: “The local is the only universal, that all art builds.”³ This last...