There Is A Spirit: The Nayler Sonnets (Pendle Hill Pamphlets Book 337)

Kenneth Boulding began writing The Nayler Sonnets as a young instructor at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. The first five or six were written in Hamilton, in the stress of the first few months of war in Europe in 1939 to 1941. The writing was interrupted in May of 1941 when he met his wife-to-be, Elise Biorn-Hansen, and the muse turned to celebrations of love in a quite different series of sonnets that continued through their fiftieth wedding anniversary and beyond (Sonnets on Courtship, Marriage & the Family).

But the war did not go away, and the Nayler sonnets returned to creep in among the love sonnets. It was at Fisk University in the years 1942-43, inspired partly by the spread of the war around the world, partly by the experience of living in a warm and friendly but beleaguered black community, that Kenneth Boulding finally finished the Nayler sonnets. Today the world is changing even more rapidly than in 1945 when the first edition of the sonnets was brought out by the Fellowship Press. Wars multiply in both hemispheres, but so do visions of a more humane and peaceful world order. These sonnets were first written to express the hope that lies beyond despair, and their re-publication today is an affirmation of the same hope.