A sophomoric effort

Submitted by Stuart Denenberg (United States), Nov 27, 2007 at 17:33

...

Kahlil Gibran was the brilliant 15-year old illustrator of the cover of "Omar Khayyam," an artist worthy of the attention of Albert Pinkham Ryder, Edward Steichen and F. Holland Day (founder of the pictorialist school of American photography, publisher of "The Yellow Book" where one could read Oscar Wilde and view drawings by Aubrey Beardsley, ...) As part of the West Tenth Street Studio complex in New York, and an exhibiting fine artist, Gibran achieved a Leonardesque elegance in draughtsmanship, and was an American member of the Symbolist movement in European vogue at the time.

Gibran also transformed the Arabic language, much as Pushkin transformed Russian, bringing a wealth of philosophical and if you will, ‘spiritual,' content into quotidien Arabic, accessible Arabic, even as he was an organizing charismatic force behind the complex politics of Lebanese independence and International Pacifism.

Gibran was on the Editorial Board of "The Seven Arts," where one can find--if one bothers to look!-- Van Wyck Brooks, James Oppenheim, and Randolph Bourne, all admiring colleagues. He was a literary sophisticate of his era, influenced by early Boston transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. His late 19th--early 20th century orientation found natural, syncretic resonance in the majestic language of the Old and New Testament, as well as in the Koran, and took form in his masterpiece, "The Prophet," whose elegant and straightforward humanist arguments are the real thorn...

...a church rejected by Gibran for its hypocrisy, its doctrine consistently aligned with the business/money cabal and against the utter compassion manifest in Jesus's life. Recall another title by Gibran, "Jesus, Son of Man," and hear the still small voice that nobly attempted to subvert the mesmerism of the faithful herd and awaken the genius of the individual human being to the wonder of the universe, and to the richness of the wisdom of the heart.

If he is not James Joyce, nor Yeats, nor Eliot, it is because his path was far different, as Joyce is not Yeats, and Eliot is not Joyce....Gibran's language is authentic. ...

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