Podcast by Raymond Scheindlin, Professor Emeritus of Medieval Hebrew Literature, Jewish Theological Seminary.
“Solomon Ibn Gabirol, a Hebrew poet and philosopher active in eleventh-century Muslim Spain, was one of the greatest poets of the Hebrew Golden Age. His body of poetic work deals with the secular and the sacred, the personal and the public, in a voice that ranges from the acerbic to the ethereal and that is always distinctively his own. From the perspective of his own troubled selfhood, he strives to evoke the struggle of the tormented soul to reach the transcendent. For his ability to evoke the majesty of the cosmos through the complexity of the individual, Ibn Gabirol has been acclaimed for almost a millennium.”