Don Quixote

This is not Cervantes' Don Quixote, but rather Madison Julius Cawein's poetic meditation on the eternal idealist who tilted at windmills. Cawein, the "Keats of Kentucky," brings his lush, Romantic sensibility to the legend of the knight-errant, rendering in verse the tragicomic figure who chooses delusion over drab reality. The collection pulses with the ancient springs of inspiration, invoking Hippocrene and the Muses, asking what it means to live by impossible dreams when the world has moved on. Cawein's Kentucky landscapes blend with La Mancha's sun-scorched hills, as the poet explores the same tension that defined his own life: the cashier who saved pennies to return home and write, the man who chose poetry over practicality. These are poems about the cost and glory of seeing the world not as it is, but as it might be. For readers who cherish the Romantics, who believe that madness and genius often wear the same face, Cawein offers a luminous American reimagining of the fool who refused to stop believing.