The Truth and Beauty: How the Lives and Works of England's Greatest Poets Point the Way to a Deeper Understanding of the Words of Jesus by Andrew Klavan

Beauty descends from God into nature, but there it would perish and does except when a Man appreciates it with worship and thus as it were sends it back to God: so that through his consciousness what descended ascends again and the perfect circle is made." — C.S. Lewis, letter to Arthur Greaves

As I read this book it occurred to me that it described the process of Andrew Klavan discovering what Lewis describes above and then fleshing it out using examples from poetry and other written art. He never references the quote but it has long been one of my favorites. Along the way we get the lives of some of the poets and then Klavan's own deeper dive into the Gospels.

I picked this up from the library on the strength of the enthusiastic comments from The Literary Life podcast folks who were working their way through it. I agreed with them as I read the first half and don't think they'd gotten to Klavan's commentary on the Gospels yet which I occasionally found problematic. I myself sometimes found Klavan's Gospel interpretations to be uncomfortably far afield from my own understanding. I haven't gone to the trouble of learning Greek, as Klavan did, but I have read a wide number of commentaries from people who knew the Greek themselves. That is a fairly small quibble though.

This is a book that opens your eyes to the power of art, nature, and our own imaginations in finding and furthering our personal friendship with Christ. That's the part that spoke to me. I read it in two days and it definitely is a book I'll reread.