There is a Spirit - The Nayler Sonnets

by Kenneth Boulding

Overview

It is now more than fifty years since The Nayler Sonnets were published, and since I began writing them as a young instructor at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The first five or six were written in Hamilton, in the stress of the first few months of war in Europe in 1939 to 1941. The writing was interrupted in May of 1941 when I met my wife-to-be, Elise Biorn-Hansen, and the muse turned to celebrations of love in a quite different series of sonnets that has continued through our fiftieth wedding anniversary and beyond (see Sonnets on Courtship, Marriage & the Family).

But the war did not go away, and the Nayler sonnets returned to creep in among the love sonnets. It was at Fisk University in the years 1942-43, inspired partly by the spread of the war around the world, partly by the experience of living in a warm and friendly but beleaguered black community, that I finally finished the Nayler sonnets. Today the world is changing even more rapidly than in 1945 when the first edition of the sonnets was brought out by the Fellowship Press. Wars multiply in both hemispheres, but so do visions of a more humane and peaceful world order. These sonnets were first written to express the hope that lies beyond despair, and their re-publication today is an affirmation of the same hope.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940148172291
Publisher:	Pendle Hill Publications
Publication date:	02/05/2014
Series:	Pendle Hill Pamphlets , #337
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	30
File size:	259 KB

About the Author

Kenneth Boulding was born in 1910, in Liverpool, England. Raised a Methodist, he was attracted to the Religious Society of Friends by the peace testimony and the meeting for worship, and joined Friends when an undergraduate at Oxford. Starting as a chemist, he became an economist, came to America as a graduate student to the University of Chicago in 1932, and emigrated in 1937. By the time of his death in 1993, Kenneth had become a magisterial figure in the field of social science. He taught at universities on three continents; authored more than thirty books and hundreds of articles, pamphlets, and chapters on numerous topics; and received ten honorary degrees. He married Elise Biorn-Hansen in 1941; they have five children and thirteen grandchildren, and have both been active from the beginning in the peace research movement, and in many Friends meetings and organizations.
Other Pendle Hill pamphlets by Kenneth Boulding:
#17 New Nations for Old,
#136 The Evolutionary Potential of Quakerism,
#153 The Mayer/Boulding Dialogue on Peace Research,
#266 Mending the World: Quaker Insights on the Social Order.