Project Nationhood, that new space of civic and psychic belonging that was going to be forged out of the inchoate desires of different ethnic nationalities yoked together by colonialism, was singularly blessed by the presence of a stellar cast of nationalist heroes and sheroes, of statesmen and women, some destined for demiurgic roles, some destined for vatic roles, some destined to combine both and even more roles as they screamed at that emergent nation at the crossroads: igbo re, ona re!

The poems are written primarily in the vatic mode: "We will gather / the invisible wealth / lost between the cities / will chain up the monsters of history." Many poems are incantatory as well--ritual medicine in their presentation and intent, often signaled by the use of anaphora: "spell me the name of my land / spell me the name of my mother / my eyelids have been closed / for too many centuries ..."

spiritual."Alice Notley's vatic power grows with each new book

The statement, "Thucydides demonstrates a freedom even greater than Perikles', for he speaks without any pretense of self-sufficiency" exemplifies vatic puzzles for "mere" historians (50).

One may look back at Emerson's vatic boosterism with irony but not with legitimate disdain; the ardent hope may be far from fulfillment, and may be receding by the moment, but it is no less beautiful for that.

I had an absurdly vatic dream: I found myself back in Russia, in Leningrad, in a huge apartment on the Petrograd Side of the city, standing with close friends and their grown children, gnashing sunflower seeds and spitting the shells onto a luxurious Oriental rug.

But he embraced Jesus (the Word made flesh) as a living avatar of Imagination as the true religion--"All had originally one language, and one religion: this was the religion of Jesus, the everlasting Gospel" (Blake's Descriptive Catalogue)--and the Bible as vatic literature.

Peter's Basilica in Vatic City,AaAeAeA Pope Francis marked the start of the Jubilee of Mercy, a speci Holy Year within the Roman Catholic Church.

VATIC A Large vessel or tank B Boundless C Prophetic who am I?

In a central statement, Raman describes the inevitability of the Sidney-Descartes connection: "If, for Descartes, geometrical construction converts the formal logic of algebraic analysis into an intuitive grasp of truth akin to divination, the turn inward to the heart in this sonnet [by Sidney] likewise achieves a re-vision; it changes the very mode of seeing: from the observation of a series of mechanical movements between causes and effects into an almost vatic insight into the totality of their deeper, underlying connectedness" (236).