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Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Literary Work As Epic

 
AuthorRon Price
 
Title of item
Pioneering Over Four Epochs: Literary Work As Epic
 
Subtitle of item
Epic Poetry, Epic Narrative and the Epic of Bahá'í History
Parent publication   Pioneering Over Four Epochs: An Autobiographical Study and a Study in Autobiography
Date of this edition 2005
LanguageEnglish
Permission public domain
Posted 2005-02-22 by Ron Price
Classified in Essays and poetry by Ron Price
URLbahai-library.com/memoir_autobiography_poetry_narrative
Abstract In the ten year period September 1997 to September 2007 the concept, the organizing principle, the basis for my magnum opus Pioneering Over Four Epochs, as epic, found its first shaping.
Notes My epic-opus includes: 6600 prose-poems, a 2600 page five volume autobiographical-narrative; a collection of 5000 letters, emails and internet posts; 400 essays, a 300 page study of the poetry of Roger White; an internet site of 3000 pages. This skeletal framework, these literary media and genres of writing could be seen as a single work in parts, a unity in multiplicity, a total oeuvre which came to be defined as epic by sensible and insensible degrees during the decade 1997 to 2007.

This literary endeavour deals with aspects of the history and development, the ideas and ideals, the philosophy and sociology of a new polity. This polity is viewed through the lens of the life experience of a pioneer over the four epochs 1944 to 2021 & his opitcal and analytical integration, his take, on some of the insights of several thousand thinkers in the history of civilization.

This concept of his prose and poetry, as epic, took shape from 1997 to 2007 after more than 50 years of association with what may well prove to be the greatest epic in human history, the gradual realization of the wondrous vision, the brightest emanations of the mind of the prophet-founder of the Bahai Faith and what Bahais believe will become, over time, the fairest fruit of the fairest civilization the world has yet seen. During these ten years, the author's final years of full-time teaching in a technical and further education college in Australia and the first years of his early retirement, this concept of my work as epic sensibly and insensibly evolved. By 2007 he had been writing seriously for at least 50 years and writing poetry for 45. The concept of his written opus as epic crystallized in some detail in that decade as the projects on Mt. Carmel and the garden terraces on that Hill of God were completed. With the increasing elaboration, definition and development of the structure and concept, the notion and framework, of his entire collected works as epic has come a conceptual home of memory, action and vision which readers will find described in the following Bahai Library Online document.

No intelligent writer knows if he is any good, wrote T.S. Eliot; he must live with the possibility, the theoretical uncertainty,that his entire work has all been a waste of time. Ron Price finds this provocative idea of Eliot's has some truth. But write he must, whether for public utility or just for private pleasure, and the result is this epic work for good or ill. To approach this epic and read it certainly requires an effort on the part of readers. Ron Price likes to think that such an effort will be rewarded, that such an exercise will be worthwhile; of course, a writer can make no such guarantee.

Tags Ron Price
Cross-referencesSee also https://bahai-library.com/price_pioneering_four_epochs.
Page views 9837 hits since 2005-02-22
Edit qualitymedium: minimally proofread or edited
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Last edited
2014-03-15 23:06 EST. See previous versions [archive.org].

Documents posted between 2003-2012 had various slightly different URLs and sometimes can be found in archive.org with addresses like bahai-library.com/file.php5?file=memoir_autobiography_poetry_narrative.

 

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