Bulletin of the Santayana Society, No. 07 Fall 1989

              The Santayana Edition
The Santayana Edition is moving forward in a deliberate fashion. We are now
publishing approximately one volume per year and each of our volumes has
received the seal of "An Approved Edition" from the Modern Language
Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions. This is a considerable
accomplishment and indicates the concerted and cooperative efforts of many
persons. Furthermore we have received some very fine reviews and notices. The
New York Times Book Review describes the edition as a "new starting point for
exploring the connection between Santayana's life and ideas," and Walter
Jackson Bate, Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard University, calls it
"one of the major contributions of our generation to both philosophy and
literature."
Volume three, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, will be published in
December 1989 or January 1990. We are somewhat late in this publication
because the proofing of the volume has taken longer than anticipated. During
the editing process, the editors found that Santayana requested Scribner's to
include an appendix containing the original text of his translated quotations.
This appendix was not included in any previous publication, but it is a part of
the new critical edition. The research for nineteenth-century sources, the
proofing, and the coding for the foreign languages, particularly the Greek,
extended the time required for editing and printing the volume.
Published in the spring of 1900, Interpretations of Poetry and Religion was
George Santayana's first book-length analysis of the interrelationship between
poetry and religion. The central thesis is what Santayana calls the "single idea"
of the book "that religion and poetry are identical in essence, and differ merely
in the way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called
religion when it intervenes in life, and religion, when it merely supervenes
upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry." Contributing significantly to the
debate between science and religion at the turn of the century, the eloquence
and clearsightedness of Santayana's argument continue to influence
deliberations and research concerning the nature and psychology of religious
belief.
Interpretations is a critique of Western man's irrationalism. Its themes, as
Santayana later noted, are "anti-romantic, anti-idealistic, and demanded a Tife
of reason'" - foreshadowing the publication of his five-volume Life of Reason
(1905-1906). Poetry and religion are products of the imagination, and though
literally untrue are ideally valid modes of interpreting experience. Imagination
is the "true realm of man's infinity," and both religion and poetry are parts of
this realm.
Santayana affronted the religious and literary pieties of many of his
contemporaries, including his colleagues and mentors at Harvard, by placing
religion in an "ideal" world of poetic imagination without force or ontological
priority. Others were dismayed by his portrayal of Robert Browning as a poet of
barbarism. However, in his insightful introductory essay, Joel Porte observes