Endnotes

  1. This conference at York University proved to be only the beginning of a whole series of conferences that I would continue to organize for a generation from 1974 to 1994. See Earth’s Answer: Explorations of Planetary Culture at the Lindisfarne Conferences, eds. M. Katz, W. Marsh, and G. Thompson (New York: Harper & Row/Lindisfarne Books, 1977). See also Gaia, A Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the New Biology, ed. W. I. Thompson (Hudson, NY: Lindisfarne Press, 1987), and Gaia Two: The New Science of Becoming, ed. W. I. Thompson (Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Press, 1991).
  2. At Cornell, I had written my Master’s essay on poems of this genre. See W. I. Thompson, “Collapsed Universe and Structured Poem: an Essay in Whiteheadian Criticism,” College English, Vol. 28, No. 1, October, 1966, 15–39.
  3. This was The Imagination of an Insurrection: Dublin, Easter 1916 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967).
  4. Throughout my career, I have been hammered by leftist critics, from Conor Cruise O’Brien in The New York Review of Books on The Imagination of an Insurrection in the ’60s, to Paul Zweig on Darkness and Scattered Light in The New York Times Book Review in the ’70s, to Jean Bethke Elshtain’s review of The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light in The Nation in the ’80s.
  5. For the rest of my academic career, I would remain beneath the horizon of scholarly notice for Departments of English. Interestingly, even at the Living Literacies Conference, to which I was invited to give this talk, mine were the only books that were not present outside in the bookstall of the presenters at the conference or at the reception for the speakers in the university bookstore.
  6. See Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000).
  7. See endnote 2. The reading of Yeats’s “Among School Children” was republished in Paul Engle’s textbook, Reading Modern Poetry (Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1968).
  8. This work was published and became the book, The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience, F. Varela, E. Thompson, and E. Rosch (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991).