Raids on the Unspeakable

A collection of Merton's prose of the 1960s, published by New Directions in 1966. New Directions describes it as a turn from the other-worldly devotion of his earlier work to an engaged, often militant concern with the condition of humanity: parable and myth, essay and meditation, satire and manifesto, prose poetry and adaptations from the Arab mystic Ibn Abbad. It includes the Christmas meditation "The Time of the End Is the Time of No Room", the "Message to Poets" written for a congress of poets, a piece on Adolf Eichmann, and essays on Flannery O'Connor, Julien Green and Ionesco, together with a number of his own abstract drawings.