The Madman: His Parables and Poems

Kahlil Gibran

Jun 2011 · Sold by Knopf

About this ebook

"This volume is in part translation from the Arabic parables, in part written directly in English. A small book of only seventy pages, it is a product of the poet's youth and early manhood, rich with promise of what was to follow. It is entirely of the East, with no shading of Western thought or content. It is an expression of the passionate inner life not yet restrained and controlled by the vaster wisdom andcompassion that came to bud in The Forerunner and to full flower in The Prophet . . .

"Here for the first time Gibran registers fully his sense of that aloneness which remained with him always, even unto the end. Always he was alien to this planet, to this time and this scene, yet always he battled to reduce this distance between himself and ourselves. But as he once said, 'Ye would not.'"

--Barbara Young, in This Man from Lebanon: A Study of Kahlil Gibran

About the author

Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), poet, philosopher, and artist, was born in Lebanon, a land that has produced many prophets. The millions of Arabic-speaking peoples familiar with his writings in that language consider him the genius of his age. But he was a man whose fame and influence spread far beyond the Near East. His poetry has been translated into more than twenty languages. His drawings and paintings have been exhibited in the great capitals of the world and compared by Auguste Rodin to the work of William Blake. In the United States, which he made his home during the last twenty years of his life, he began to write in English. The Prophet and his other books of poetry, illustrated with his mystical drawings, are known and loved by innumerable American who find in them an expression of the deepest impulses of man’s heart and mind.