James Baird

Puer Papers, edited by James Hillman, examines the archetype of the puer aeternus, the radiant, aloof, sensitive, and eternal youth, in myth and poetry. Nine papers by James Baird, Thomas Cowan, James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Henry A. Murray, and Randolph Severson are examining the full range of puer phenomena. This eminently practical book grounds the archetype in the real earth of the human condition, where the puer's flights and problems are relevant to diagnosis, dream analysis hermeneutics, societal movements, and literary criticism.This newly revised and emended edition serves both as a stand-alone reader on the psychology of the puer archetype and as a companion to Senex & Puer, vol. 3 of the Uniform Edition of the Writings of James Hillman.

Originally published in 1968. In The Dome and the Rock: Structure in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, James Baird traces the process of Wallace Steven's Grand Poem and the total structure that it accomplished in language. In the words of Professor Baird, "The full art of Stevens is organized with architectural precision. The shape of the mind becomes a building, the framework of which is founded in a willed symmetry of design." In The Dome and the Rock, James Baird exposes the capacity of Wallace Stevens to design his poetry in a manner similar to an architect, and he "reveals the craftsmanship of [Wallace's] acts as builder."

Originally published in 1956. In Ishmael, Professor James Baird responds to the increasing secularization of Western civilization and the creation of what he calls "authentic primitivism." For Baird, the aesthetic austerity of Protestantism undermined the structure of symbols created by Catholicism. In the absence of a meaningful structure of cultural authority in Western civilization, "primary art" took on a quasi-religious role by connecting humans to a transcendent being. Ishmael describes a new system of art, beginning around 1850, that supplanted Christian symbolism. Baird examines writers who helped to create a modern authentic primitivism, with emphasis on Herman Melville, whom Baird sees as a locus of change for the cultural significance of primary art. Baird provides a social history and biography of writers who participated in the primary art movement from 1850 to 1950