James Matthew Wilson

James Matthew Wilson
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James Matthew Wilson is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities and Augustinian Traditions at Villanova University. An award-winning scholar of philosophical-theology and literature, he has authored dozens of essays, articles, and reviews on subjects ranging from art, ethics, and politics, to meter and poetic form, from the importance of local culture to the nature of truth, goodness, and beauty. Wilson is also a poet and critic of contemporary poetry, whose work appears regularly in such magazines and journals as First Things, Modern Age, The New Criterion, Dappled Things, Measure, The Weekly Standard, Front Porch Republic, The Raintown Review, and The American Conservative. He has published five books, including most recently, a collection of poems, Some Permanent Things and a monograph, The Catholic Imagination in Modern American Poetry (both Wiseblood Books, 2014). Raised in the Great Lakes State, baptised in the parish of St. Thomas Aquinas, seasoned by summers on Lake Wawasee (Indiana), and educated under the Golden Dome, Wilson is scion of a family of Hoosiers dating back to the early nineteenth century, and an offspring of Southside Chicago Poles whose tavern kept the city wet through the Depression (and prohibition) years.  He now lives under the same sentence of reluctant exile as many another native son of the Midwest, but has dug himself in for good on the margins of the Main Line in Pennsylvania with his beautiful wife, dangerous daughter, and saintly sons. For information on Wilson's scholarship and a selection of his published work, click here. See books written and recommended by James Matthew Wilson.

Recent Essays

The Joy of Being Edwin Arlington Robinson

Every semester, on the first day of the poetry courses I teach, I hold up Lilla Cabot Perry’s portrait of Edwin Arlington Robinson and...

Craft First

As part of my recent visit to Hillsdale College, where I read from my forthcoming book, The Violent and the Fallen, I gave a...

Michiganders Take Note: A Reading at Hillsdale College

As The Hillsdale Collegian announces, I shall be giving a reading from my two chapbooks of poetry at Hillsdale College this coming week.  All...

Rod Dreher Praises The Violent and the Fallen

Last month, Rod Dreher discussed two of the poems from my forthcoming book, The Violent and the Fallen, on his blog at The American Conservative. ...

What You Need to Know About Yvor Winters

This is the first entry in FPR’s One Thousand Words series. Over the next few months, perhaps longer, several dozen contributors will tell us...

The Violent and the Fallen

I am pleased to announce that The Violent and the Fallen, the second book of poems by James Matthew Wilson, is now available for...

“Monogamish”: Marriage in the Age of Caucus Races

Berwyn, PA. While the American President is appearing on late-night television to tell the world -- and the Russians -- that a permissive attitude...

What Would It Mean to Be a Catholic Writer?

Berwyn, PA.  Randy Boyagoda, my old neighbor from the Catholic ghetto that grew up around the Studebaker mansion in South Bend, writes about the...

Reading the Constitution in the Light of Russell Kirk

Berwyn, PA.  Gerald Russello reflects on Russell Kirk's theory of the unwritten Constitutionone in a new essay published on the Liberty Fund's Liberty Forum. ...

On a Sculpture by Herbert Adams

For Adams and his peers the trade of art must have itself seemed an imported thing: threatening, rarified, and set apart like thorned peaks of the Swiss Alps rupturing above the folded skin of clouds.

At Bar Harbor Once, And Once . . .

We scrambled up the craterous outcrop that ruptured like an isle in the gray sands spread thin around Cille inne Bay.

Gatsby for the Millennials

Berwyn, PA.  I was a little surprised, not too long ago, to hear a student mention that The Great Gatsby was her favorite book.  "Because...