The Art of True Relations: Conversations on the Poetic Heart of Human Possibility. This item is unavailable.The Art of True Relations: Conversations on the Poetic Heart of Human Possibility

In this inspirational discourse, scholar Sarah Wider and Buddhist leader Daisaku Ikeda celebrate the great spiritual and literary figures, East and West, who have inspired their own work as educators, poets, and peace builders, including both the men and the women of the American Renaissance. They reserve their highest praise, though, for the lesser-known influences, especially teachers and mothers, whose humble, compassionate actions provide the truest foundation for the realization of ever-greater peace. Ultimately, the book is a tribute to the bonds that give life meaning. These bonds are the ones built between friends and family; those who teach and those we might learn from; with the great thinkers of the past who live on in books, poetry, and art; with nature; and most of all with the best version of ourselves.

Sarah Wider is a professor at Colgate University, where she specializes in the American Renaissance, American women writers of the late-19th and early-20th centuries, and Native American literature. She is the author of Anna Tilden: Unitarian Culture and the Problem of Self-Representation and The Critical Reception of Emerson: Unsettling All Things. She lives in Hamilton, New York. Daisaku Ikeda is the founder and president of the Soka Gakkai International, a lay Buddhist organization with 12 million members worldwide. He has written and lectured widely on Buddhism, humanism, and ethics, and has published dialogues with global figures such as Arnold Toynbee, Linus Pauling, and Mikhail Gorbachev.