Philosophy in Review XXXII (2012), no. 4 337 John G. Trapani, Jr. Poetry, Beauty, and Contemplation: The Complete Aesthetics of Jacques Maritain. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press 2011. xii + 176 pages $34.95 (paper ISBN 978–0–81321825–0) Given Jacques Maritain’s enormous influence on a host of twentieth-century artists, writers, and musicians, this synthesis of his aesthetics is long overdue. The delay is understandable, however, when one considers the daunting task of sifting through the French neo-Thomist’s dispersed writings on art and beauty, anchoring them in his metaphysics and epistemology, and arranging them into some kind of order. Trapani, thankfully, has managed to do just this. He opens the book with a biographical sketch and introduction to Maritain’s metaphysics and epistemology. He explains that although Maritain admired Henri Bergson’s intuitionism, Maritain eventually deemed Bergson’s notion of ‘concept’ incompatible with the Catholic faith he embraced in 1906. His reading of Thomas Aquinas reconfirmed his criticism of Bergson. The intellect, according to Aquinas, is an immaterial knowing power operating together with the senses and endowed with the capacity to know being. Only against this background of Aristotelian-Thomistic epistemology, Trapani argues, can we understand Maritain’s ingenious reformulation of intuitional, nonconceptual knowledge as the basis for ‘Poetry’ and ‘Poetic Knowledge.’ Trapani traces the evolution of these terms throughout Maritain’s career, distilling the transcendent, ontological priority of the former over the latter both in artistic production and in the perception of beauty. ‘Poetry,’ writes Maritain, is the ‘intercommunication between the inner being of things and the inner being of the human Self’ (72). It ‘implies an essential requirement of totality or integrity’ (83). Whereas in his earlier writings Poetic Knowledge meant roughly the same thing, it later came to refer to the ‘know how’ of artistic making. Trapani spends a large portion of the book teasing out the distinction between artistic production and the perception of beauty both from a historical and a theoretical point of view. One of his principal aims is to elaborate how it is possible for one to take pleasure in the beauty of an artifact he or she has not made. Trapani carries out a fine exegesis of all three editions (1920, 1927, and 1935) of Art and Scholasticism and ultimately concludes that although Poetic Knowledge is the exclusive possession of the artist, the ‘audience,’ according to Maritain, may ‘participate’ in it through contemplation. Like Poetic Knowledge, the ‘Poetry’ common to artist and audience is an intuitive, nonconceptual, affective, connatural form of knowledge ordered to joy and delight. The book’s opening chapters are crucial to understanding how this is possible. To understand why our delight in the beautiful pertains to the ‘heart,’ we must first grasp how the intellect and the will cooperate in knowledge and desire. To grasp Maritain’s analogies between poetry and grace and natural and supernatural contemplation, we must first appreciate the mutual fecundity of his philosophy and Christian faith. To grasp the beautiful as a special kind of good, we must first study the metaphysics of the transcendentals: being, one, good, truth, etc. With regard to the ‘heart,’ only a sound epistemology will lend credibility to the idea of ‘spiritualized