By George A. Panichas

"Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity, inspired by a passage from Plato's Phaedrus, serves as a coda to my critical trilogy, published over a span of nearly twenty years: The Reverent Discipline (1974), The courage of Judgement (1982), and The Critic as Conservator (1992). My title here provides the encompassing poetic image-and the inspiration behind my critical intent- of ultimately overcoming the crises of modernism in which we agonize, and of attaining the promise of spiritual and moral order.

George Panichas, a moralist and humanist critic of twentieth-century life, literature, and thought, teaches and writes in the area of English and Comparative Literature, especially on the interdisciplinary relations between literature (British, American, and Continental) and politics, education, history, philosophy, and religion.

"This, then, is the sort of masterpiece that all too rarely comes our way. Turning the pages, one is awed at the sweep of Panichas's erudition, the stateliness and maturity of his tone, the penetration of his vision. There is here in abundance the stark authentic courage born of fidelity to principle: one thinks of Elijah rebuking the fallen Ahab and his paganized people. As conservative commentaries on the galloping impiety of our age manifest increasing superficiality and glibness, it is refreshing and heartening to encounter a reminder of what the conservative mind at its best can do. A brilliant culmination of a life's work, Growing Wings to Overcome Gravity belongs on the same shelf with Democracy and Leadership, Ideas have Consequences, Visions of Order, and Enemies of the Permanent Things—and in the hands of all reflective people seeking to redeem the time."

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