From the Hidden Way by James Branch Cabell

From the Hidden Way is James Branch Cabell's cultivated, mock-serious book of verse, a playful meditation on love, mortality, beauty, and the vanished voices of earlier ages. Framed by an ironic introduction and elegant dedication, it argues that older poetry was not naïve but wondrous, and that true art restores the strangeness of ordinary life while resisting modern novelty for novelty's sake. Cabell presents his translations, adaptations, and original poems as acts of admiration for inherited forms and forgotten writers, creating a self-conscious literary manifesto as much as a collection of lyrics. The poems move through mythic, classical, and historical scenes: a defiant love story punished by the gods, Helen's beauty as the cause of Troy's ruin, and stark encounters among Caiaphas, Pilate, and a grieving Magdalene. Elsewhere, Marcus Aurelius, a religious zealot, and voices torn between faith and desire deepen the book's moral tension. Across the sequence, Cabell returns to spring, youth, and fleeting pleasure in lyrics that celebrate April and May even as they acknowledge age, loss, and death. The result is an elegant tapestry of irony, longing, devotion, and the uneasy boundary between holiness and human passion. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.