“Makes a powerful and convincing case for restoring John Dickinson to his rightful place in the first rank of the Founders.” —The Washington Times The Cost of Liberty offers a sorely needed reassessment of a great patriot and misunderstood Founder. It has been more than a half century since a biography of John Dickinson appeared. Author William Murchison rectifies this mistake, bringing to life one of the most influential figures of the entire Founding period, a principled man whose gifts as writer, speaker, and philosopher only Jefferson came near to matching. In the process, Murchison destroys the caricature of Dickinson that has emerged from such popular treatments as HBO’s John Adams miniseries and the Broadway musical 1776. Dickinson is remembered mostly for his reluctance to sign the Declaration of Independence. But that reluctance, Murchison shows, had nothing to do with a lack of patriotism. In fact, Dickinson immediately took up arms to serve the colonial cause—something only one signer of the Declaration did. He stood on principle to oppose declaring independence at that moment, even when he knew that doing so would deal the “finishing blow” to his once-great reputation. Dubbed the “Penman of the Revolution,” Dickinson was not just a scribe but also a shaper of mighty events. From the 1760s through the late 1780s he was present at, and played a significant role in, every major assemblage where the Founders charted America’s path—a claim few others could make. Author of the landmark essays Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, delegate to the Continental Congress, key figure behind the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution, chief executive of both Pennsylvania and Delaware: Dickinson was, as one esteemed historian aptly put it, “the most underrated of all the Founders.” This lively biography gives a great Founder his long-overdue measure of honor.
Author William E. Dickinson, a painter of words, illuminates beauty as the heart and soul of his writing. He tries to emancipate the reader from a regular day into mystical feelings of God's love, endearing softly through his poetry. May the beauty of the moment extend to all of your skies, softly afloat on angels' wings, as Heaven casts the light in your eyes. The soul of love in a safe harbor lies always with serenity. About the Author William E. Dickinson, a painter of words, was born a short drive from his ancestor Emily Dickinson's birthplace in Amherst, Massachusetts. Dickinson's writing started in earnest after breaking a few backbones in a 1988 fall. His penchant for writing became two thousand poems and, after a new marriage, over three thousand poems, with many published. His published compendium, " Breath Torn Away by Sept. 11," was a poetic ride through terror and humanity's heroic triumphs. His novel The Wisdom Seeker and two sequels are soon to be published. A new novel, " Missionary of Death," is being written with Dickinson as coauthor with Greg Nassar. Dickinson's last extensive poetry book is "Golden Strands and Bright Sunsets with Blue Echoes of Heart and Soul." Empathy for all life is the soul of his writing. Gardening, choir, and Aikido are relaxing and meditative pursuits Dickinson enjoys. His new marriage gives him the contemplative assets for even more lovely poetry.
In Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, William Logan, the noted and often controversial critic of contemporary poetry, returns to some of the greatest poems in English literature. He reveals what we may not have seen before and what his critical eye can do with what he loves. In essays that pair different poems—“Ozymandias,” “On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “After great pain, a formal feeling comes,” and “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” among others—Logan reconciles history and poetry to provide new ways of reading poets ranging from Shakespeare and Shelley to Lowell and Heaney. In these striking essays, Logan presents the poetry of the past through the lens of the past, attempting to bring poems back to the world in which they were made. Logan’s criticism is informed by the material culture of that world, whether postal deliveries in Regency London, the Métro lighting in 1911 Paris, or the wheelbarrows used in 1923. Deeper knowledge of the poet’s daily existence lets us read old poems afresh, providing a new way of understanding poems now encrusted with commentary. Logan shows that criticism cannot just root blindly among the words of the poem but must live partly in a lost world, in the shadow of the poet’s life and the shadow of the age.
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