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 Locality of the Church. Or, Where’s Wilson?

Such is the wisdom of James Matthew Wilson that it appears a jewel precious in the eyes of Jason Peters.  This Peters will embarrass  and pester and...

The Trouble With Goodness

This last September, the Future Symphony Institute invited me to address its first annual conference on some of the philosophical problems in our age...

Some Permanent Things In Print

In an endnote to The Idea of a Christian Society, T.S. Eliot makes this categorical claim: Conservatism is too often conservation of the wrong things:...

The Good Man Must Himself Be a True Poem

The M.F.A. program in Creative Writing at the University of Notre Dame has just published an interview with me as part of its alumni...

The Violent and the Fallen On the Airwaves

Holy Family Radio in Grand Rapids, Michigan, recently aired John Pinheiro's interview with me on his weekly program, Faith and Reason.  Pinheiro asked me...

“Standard Oil” Catholicism

Berwyn, PA.  The American Conservative has just published the online version of my review of Suitable Accommodations, a selected letters of the Catholic fiction...

Despair, Delight, and the Decentered Self

Berwyn, PA.  The Fine Delight Interview Series with Catholic authors, conducted by the author of the book of the same name, Nick Ripatrazone, has...

Come and Hear, or Read, “The Violent and the Fallen”

My second collection of poems, The Violent and the Fallen, is now available on amazon.com, and directly from the publisher. Those interested may also write directly to fourverseletters@gmail.com to...

In Praise of Mediocrity

Berwyn, PA. Everyone knows G.K. Chesterton's aphorism that, if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.  Dappled Things writer Karen Ullo...

What You Need to Know about Dana Gioia

Dana Gioia has spent his career making metaphors: drawing disparate things together to reveal the breadth and depth of aesthetic experience, but doing so...

Of Vision and Discipline

After six years absence, I have just published a review essay in the great Contemporary Poetry Review, one of the first important internet critical journals. ...

Poems about God

I'm in the middle of writing a short essay on John Crowe Ransom's first book, Poems about God (1919).  In his early poems even...