Millennial Harvest: The Life & Collected Poems of Charles Greenleaf Bell (Helen Lane Editions)

Millennial Harvest is a unique and most wonderful project. Neither a book of scholarly essays nor solely a collection of poetry, Millennial Harvest interweaves poetry and prose into a continuous personal narrative in the manner of Dante’s La Vita Nuova. It does so with a tremendous intellectual scope, a very wide range of references, and an original vision of the evolution of a writer’s consciousness, as well as with sharp and memorable portraits of some of the people involved—Simone Weil, Albert Einstein, Erika Mann, and William Carlos Williams, for example. Above all, Millennial Harvest is the autobiography of a beloved, highly gifted, and most unusual man.

For seventy or so years, Charles Bell has been a great thinker and a great teacher and has brought enlightenment and joy to countless others. Like that of many of the great thinker-teachers, a number of Charles’ own writings have gone unpublished or are out of print.

Now, for the first time, all his poetic work is brought together, thoroughly revised and in a way that allows each part to be read in relationship to the rest—a boon to all Bell’s admirers and to the many admirers who will doubtless spring up, of whom there will be many. Charles’ writing makes highly entertaining, indeed gripping, reading and is full of startling insights; and it is often very, very funny.