Powers of Being

de Edwin Webb

To mark the seventieth birthday of one of Britain's most prolific writers, teachers and academics from the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom contributed a collection of specially written essays defining and appraising Holbrook's work in all its varieties. The result is Powers of Being, which addresses the issues proposed by Holbrook and celebrates a singular and distinguished literary achievement. The range of Holbrook's work is astonishing, but his readers find it equally astonishing that his critical and creative output is not more widely known. In large measure, this may be because Holbrook stands outside the currently fashionable in the world of letters; he is opposed to the decadence and the nihilism, as he sees it, of much modern culture and its seeming obsession with violence, destruction, and death. For Holbrook, the value of literature is its value for life; for the establishment of meaning in living through the confrontation with experience and the rejection of false solutions. Thus the drive to authentic living demands that one locates and releases, through creativity and love, those "powers of being" (in Holbrook's own phrase) that identify the true self.