Festus: an Epic
Philip James Bailey
ed. Mischa Willett · Edinburgh University Press
A Critical EditionThe first scholarly edition in more than a century of Philip James Bailey’s Victorian epic, restored to a readable modern volume by poet and critic Mischa Willett.
Once an artistic sensation on both sides of the Atlantic—admired by Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Longfellow, and broadly influential on later writers—Festus is a vast pageant of theology, science, and speculative philosophy, an attempt to set the relation of God to man in verse. Willett’s edition supplies the poem’s first full lineation, a guide to its imagery, and a clear account of Bailey’s life, the Spasmodic school he fathered, and the poem’s strange afterlife of fame and later neglect.
Both learned and newly approachable, this striking recovery balances scholarly care with the fire, excess, and abiding strangeness that made Festus one of the nineteenth century’s most unlikely bestsellers.
Sample Poems
-
Life’s more than breath and the quick round of blood;
It is a great spirit and a busy heart.
The coward and the small in soul scarce do live.
One generous feeling—one great thought—one deed
Of good, ere night, would make life longer seem
Than if each year might number a thousand days,
Spent as is this by nations of mankind.
We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths;
In feelings, not in figures on a dial.
We should count time by heart-throbs. He most lives
Who thinks most—feels the noblest—acts the best.
Life’s but a means unto an end—that end
Beginning, mean, and end to all things—God. -
Art is man’s nature; nature is God’s art.
Let each man think himself an act of God,
His mind a thought, his life a breath of God;
And let each try, by great thoughts and good deeds,
To show the most of Heaven he hath in him.
