James Matthew Wilson

Wilson is the author of two chapbooks of poems, Four Verse Letters and The Violent and the Fallen, as well as of Timothy Steele: A Critical Introduction, and many poems, essays, articles and reviews.  He is currently Associate Professor of Literature and Religion at Villanova University.

Purchase his most recent Wiseblood Books release, The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. ​

Praise for Some Permanent Things & The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry

“Wilson's poems display a rare degree of skill and ambition, but he is never content with mere virtuosity, always reaching for spiritual and emotional intensity. 
      --Dana Gioia

In James Matthew Wilson’s newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today.
     --Helen Pinkerton Trimpi

This is James Matthew Wilson’s first full-length book of poems, and a singularly powerful announcement it is . . . philosophy, metaphysics, theology, the American political scene viewed through the complex lenses of the classics, with allusions ranging from the ancients to the moderns . . . all woven into a complex music which has anchored itself in the long tradition of meter and rhyme. . . He is a word painter . . . with the eye of someone for whom the essential being of things—the quiddity, the inscape—leads again and again into a deeper mystery. Here is a serious poet, not yet forty, who is, I can only hope, at the beginning of a long and illustrious journey in the best and most profound tradition of Dante, Hopkins, David Jones, Auden, Eliot, and Franz Wright.
    --Paul Mariani

In The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry, poet and critic James Matthew Wilson offers a succinct summary of how Catholicism’s unified and sacramental vision of the world influenced some of the twentieth century’s most original voices. His elegant and sure-footed treatment of work of nearly 20 poets—from George Santayana’s aesthetics of ascent to Dana Gioia’s dramatic lyricism—make this is essential reading for any student of modern American poetry.
     --Micah Mattix

TO LEARN MORE, VISIT JAMES MATTHEW WILSON'S AUTHOR PAGE: 
http://www.jamesmatthewwilson.com