[Captainpaintball]

Anthony Daniels of C-3PO fame?

[dr_lew]

We were warned not to like The Prophet in high school in the sixties. IMHO, there’s nothing really wrong with it, except it’s a bit overdrawn, maybe.

[Enchante]

Well, well, I always suspected that “The Prophet” was drooling gibberish, but I never could get beyond a quick flip of the pages in a bookstore to really find out. When I glanced at a few passages at random, I derived the same impression as Anthony Daniels has developed with further examination: kitschy, unreflective, insipid “New Age” gibberish..... even if it was written all the way back in 1923.... he anticipated the “New Age” mentality quite well.

[wintertime]

Kahlil Gibran.

Personally, I am thoroughly tired of weddings in which immature couples have decided to write their own, very trite, wedding vows. Invariably they quote Kahill Gibran. ( gag!)

[Tax-chick]

Here is a recent review, from “First Things,” of Gibran’s “Complete Works”:

http://www.firstthings.com/article.php3?id_article=6068

The best lines, in my opinion:

And it is the voice of Sir Laurence
Reading the King James Bible
That I hear within me as I write these words,
Which echo resonates within and bequeaths to me
The Prophetic Strain,
At least as far as you know.
Once that voice enters the mind,
As it does when one has read hundreds and hundreds of pages of Kahlil Gibran,
Its abode is fixed within,
It refuses all notices of eviction,
It continues to loop within the sphere of one’s skull,
An earworm, dread and implacable.

[668 - Neighbor of the Beast]

While I’ve no taste for mystics, new age heroes, and exquisitely sensitive poets...I’d settle for a Middle East full of Gibrans.

[dighton]

One looks in vain in these many pages for an arresting or poetic metaphor. I quote at random:

Dip your oar, my beloved,
And let me touch my strings.

It is impossible to plumb the shallows of this.

[Semper]

That was much too long and tedious an article just to say, "I really don't like Kahlil Gibran and I'll tell you why over and over again".

I'll give him an aphorism from Semper: "You can't see in others that which is not also in yourself".