"Pieta: Song of the Blessed Virgin " is the culminating volume of a master poet, who has charted his own truth and passage through the thicket of lesser work, of a host of contemporaries with limited pith and vision, venal ambition, a dogged tendency to measure themselves against peers and seldom the truly great. Witness here some sample rejections:

"Your work has great power and mounting intensity but takes us further than we care to follow."

"We can't publish this, but I'd like to meet you."

"Your poem 'The Hitler Sonata'] would seep through the adjacent pages of our magazine and...

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power the power to dominate is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more...

Power is the central organizing principle of all social life, from culture and education to stratification and taste. And there is no more prominent name in the analysis of power than that of noted sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Throughout his career, Bourdieu challenged the commonly held view that symbolic power-the power to dominate-is solely symbolic. He emphasized that symbolic power helps create and maintain social hierarchies, which form the very bedrock of political life. By the time of his death in 2002, Bourdieu had become a leading public intellectual, and his argument about the more...