Editorial

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Open AccessEditorial

Introduction to Special Issue “English Poetry and Christianity”

by Kevin Hart

Religions 2017, 8(9), 161; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8090161 - 24 Aug 2017

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The hallowed scholarly area known as “Religion and Literature” has been seeking to expand itself, clarify itself, and even justify itself over the last decade or two.[...] Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

Research

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331 KiB

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Entanglement in Fir: Thinking Matter in Peter Larkin’s “praying // firs \\ attenuate”

by Emma Mason

Religions 2018, 9(1), 1; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel9010001 - 21 Dec 2017

Cited by 4 | Viewed by 3439

Abstract

This article reads Peter Larkin’s poem “praying // firs \\ attenuate” (2014) as a way to think the divine in relation to the ecological as a mutual poetic giving. It suggests that the poem entangles the reader in a series of relational imaginings [...] Read more.

This article reads Peter Larkin’s poem “praying // firs \\ attenuate” (2014) as a way to think the divine in relation to the ecological as a mutual poetic giving. It suggests that the poem entangles the reader in a series of relational imaginings that complicates the modern commodification of the nonhuman and questions a secular fatigue with the divine. Through a Catholic metaphysics in which all things—human, nonhuman, holy—are entangled, Larkin’s religious ecology maps the way to horizons promising that which cannot yet be imagined. In an entangled, layered, rhythmic, and echoing poetic form, Larkin reveals the intimate relationship between plenitude and the attenuated, gift and scarcity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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Elizabeth Bishop’s Grammar School for the Aspect-Blind and A-rhetorical

by Walter Jost

Religions 2017, 8(7), 125; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8070125 - 11 Jul 2017

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Abstract

This paper uses Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “Over 2000 Illustrations and a Complete Concordance” as an exemplar that displays the centrality of aspect perception in her work. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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The Negative Theology of Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction”

by William Franke

Religions 2017, 8(4), 54; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8040054 - 01 Apr 2017

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Abstract

The supreme fiction is the one that cannot be said or represented at all. Like a negative theologian; Stevens starts from a position of critical reflection that can no longer naively believe in the myths of the gods. They have become fiction rather [...] Read more.

The supreme fiction is the one that cannot be said or represented at all. Like a negative theologian; Stevens starts from a position of critical reflection that can no longer naively believe in the myths of the gods. They have become fiction rather than revelation. And yet this supreme fiction; now become nameless; nevertheless animates all his desire: “For what; except for you; do I feel love?” These myths or fictions bring him peace of mind in vivid transparence; even though he can assign them no definite reference in reality. What becomes transparent in this late age of critical reflection is that the world we see and talk about is an “invented world,” the product of our own imagination and language. This destroys our naive belief in the myths projected by our language. Our gods die. Yet precisely this realization can open us to that “heaven/That has expelled us and our images,” the heaven that we do not perceive and cannot conceive—since it is beyond the reach of language. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetry of Meditation

by James Matthew Wilson

Religions 2017, 8(1), 10; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8010010 - 11 Jan 2017

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Abstract

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has won the admiration of a number of Christian poets and scholars. This essay argues that one reason for this is Bishop’s subtle engagement with the work of the poet-divines Gerard Manley Hopkins and, especially, George Herbert; through their influence, [...] Read more.

Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has won the admiration of a number of Christian poets and scholars. This essay argues that one reason for this is Bishop’s subtle engagement with the work of the poet-divines Gerard Manley Hopkins and, especially, George Herbert; through their influence, she enters into the guiding western poetic tradition of the meditative lyric, which is rooted in the Platonic and Christian accounts of the human person as an image of the Triune God in virtue of the mind as a trinity of memory, understanding, and will. Bishop practiced poetry as a moral act open to a divinity it cannot account for or even name, but traces of whose significance run through the world her poems depict. By considering her work, and her poem “The Weed” in particular, in the context of Herbert, the historical studies of Louis L. Martz, and the literary theory of Yvor Winters, we see that Bishop the unbeliever cannot properly be understood as a “secular” poet, but as one who recognizes the meditative lyric as a way of arriving at understanding of a truth that transcends us. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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Transatlantic Abolitionist Discourse and the Body of Christ in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”

by Joshua King

Religions 2017, 8(1), 3; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8010003 - 27 Dec 2016

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Abstract

Despite renewed interest in roles played by Christianity in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), few scholars have discussed her treatment of the body of Christ—understood as both the figure of Christ and his body of followers—in her antislavery poem, “The Runaway [...] Read more.

Despite renewed interest in roles played by Christianity in the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (EBB), few scholars have discussed her treatment of the body of Christ—understood as both the figure of Christ and his body of followers—in her antislavery poem, “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point”. This article argues that “The Runaway Slave” reworks portrayals of the body of Christ in transatlantic abolitionist print culture. It examines the poem in its original context of publication in the 1848 issue of The Liberty Bell, the Boston-based antislavery annual. As EBB would have known from earlier issues of the annual that she received before writing her poem, its contributors—primarily though not exclusively privileged northern whites—represented themselves as messianic martyrs whose Christ-like suffering would liberate slaves. EBB’s poem challenges this self-glorifying rhetoric, in part by making a refrain out of words from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s well-known poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This refrain indicates that the symbols used by Liberty Bell authors to portray themselves as messianic martyrs might, to those they labor to liberate, seem perversely bound up in slavery and the color binary used to justify it. “Runaway Slave” further suggests that the Liberty Bell’s messianic rhetoric, like the slave system itself, parodies Christ’s sacrifice of himself for the good of others. In both cases, wittingly or not, whites seek to turn the bodily agony of blacks to their benefit, whether ethical or economic. Stressing that such parodies of the crucifixion only perpetuate racial violence, the poem pursues what we might call a post-secular vision of Christ’s body, suggesting that people can through love act as members of Christ outside of any official church body. EBB’s poem nevertheless risks trading in the abuses it critiques—a risk, the material history of her poem indicates, of which she might have been aware. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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Open AccessFeature PaperArticle

Poem as Endangered Being: Lacostian Soundings in Hopkins’s “Hurrahing” and Stevens’s “Blackbird”

by Matthew David Farley

Religions 2016, 7(12), 146; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120146 - 08 Dec 2016

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Abstract

This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of “things” to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a poem is endangered—crossed between the concrete and the abstract, [...] Read more.

This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of “things” to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a poem is endangered—crossed between the concrete and the abstract, the perceived and the imagined, the object and the thing. Whereas for Heidegger danger entails a technocratic closure of Dasein’s being-toward-death, for Lacoste danger is proper to the being of life. Lacoste offers two “counter-existentials” to show, contra Heidegger, that life simply cannot be being-toward-death all the time: sabbatical experience and art experience. It is to these kinds of experience that poetry clearly belongs. To illustrate what Lacoste means by sabbatical experience, I offer a reading of G.M. Hopkins’s “Hurrahing in Harvest” (1877); to illustrate what Lacoste means by art experience, I turn to Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (1917). Finally, I conclude that rather than contrast the secular poem with the religious poem it is best to think of all poetry as generically sacramental, i.e., signs and things (signum et res), with religious poetry constituting an excessive pole that is addressed to the sacrament of God (res tantum). The Christian loves the poem because the poem does not make him or her choose between God and things—in light of the Incarnation, an insupportable choice. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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‘The Way of Our Streets’: Exploring the Urban Sacred in Three Australian Poems

by Lachlan Brown

Religions 2016, 7(12), 138; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120138 - 25 Nov 2016

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Abstract

This article examines three contemporary Australian poems that concern themselves with matters of the sacred within the modern Australian city. Noting that Australian poetry and the sacred have often been studied in terms of the landscape, the article approaches these poems as part [...] Read more.

This article examines three contemporary Australian poems that concern themselves with matters of the sacred within the modern Australian city. Noting that Australian poetry and the sacred have often been studied in terms of the landscape, the article approaches these poems as part of an undercurrent of spiritual or sacred writing that takes up urban Australian spaces as important and resonant sites. Through readings of Kevin Hart’s ‘Night Music’ (2008), Jill Jones’s ‘Where We Live’ (2007) and Benjamin Frater’s ‘Ourizen’ (2011), the article demonstrates the various ways that contemporary Australian spirituality is poetically expressed in cities such as Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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Shelley’s Unknown Eros: Post-Secular Love in Epipsychidion

by Michael Tomko

Religions 2016, 7(9), 118; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7090118 - 14 Sep 2016

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Abstract

Whether Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion—a Platonic poem on love addressed to the patriarchally imprisoned Theresa Viviani or “Emily”—receives praise or blame has generally been determined by two focal passages: a secular sermon on free love and a planetary allegorical thinly veiling his [...] Read more.

Whether Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Epipsychidion—a Platonic poem on love addressed to the patriarchally imprisoned Theresa Viviani or “Emily”—receives praise or blame has generally been determined by two focal passages: a secular sermon on free love and a planetary allegorical thinly veiling his own imbroglio. This essay re-reads Shelley’s 1821 work drawing on two recent arguments: Stuart Curran’s Dantean call to take the poem’s Florentine narrator seriously as a character, not just as an autobiographical cypher, and Colin Jager’s outline of Shelley’s move beyond the assumptions of his professed atheism after 1816. Based on the poem’s structure and imagery, the paper argues that Epipsychidion critiques the false sense of revolutionary ascent and dualistic escape offered to Emily, who is commodified and erased by the narrator’s egocentric, “counterfeit divinization of eros” (Benedict XVI). Turning from this Radical Enlightenment Platonism, the poem momentarily realizes an embodied, hylomorphic romantic union akin to the Christian nuptial mystery of two becoming “one flesh” (Mark 10:8). This ideal, however, collapses back into solipsism when the narrator cannot understand or accept love as a “unity in duality” (Benedict XVI). This paper thus claims Epipsychidion as a post-secular inquiry into the problem of love whose philosophic limits and theological horizons are both surprising and instructive. It also reclaims Shelley as a phenomenological poet who can open up the world to Christian and non-Christian readers, one whose Platonic and Dantean formation lend him an openness to transcendence and one whose countercultural path through life makes him wary of inhumane appropriations of religion. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

Other

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“And Thou, all-Shaking Thunder…”A Theological Notation to Lines 1–38 of King Lear, Act III, Scene II

by William C. Hackett

Religions 2017, 8(5), 91; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8050091 - 11 May 2017

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Abstract

In the dramas of Shakespeare, the madman and the fool speak in prose; wisdom and sanity are properly poeticised. King Lear is no exception: I go some way in providing a theological notation to a crucial moment of Lear’s descent into madness, the [...] Read more.

In the dramas of Shakespeare, the madman and the fool speak in prose; wisdom and sanity are properly poeticised. King Lear is no exception: I go some way in providing a theological notation to a crucial moment of Lear’s descent into madness, the fracturing of his blank verse into prose. Is the storm on the heath a representation of the turmoil of his mind? Or is it a theophany, the manifestation of divine displeasure at human foolishness? Finding between the verse and the prose the theological tradition of Christianity will allow us to negotiate this question and to understand a little more clearly the peculiar wisdom of poetry for Christianity. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

209 KiB

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Geoffrey Hill’s “Hard-Won Affirmation”: The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy

by Paul J. Contino

Religions 2016, 7(12), 143; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel7120143 - 05 Dec 2016

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Abstract

Sir Geoffrey Hill, long hailed as Britain’s greatest living poet, was devoted to remembering the deceased, those forgotten in the debased din of mass culture—some of them worthy of our emulation, others edifying by their “folly” or “criminality” (Paris Review interview). Hill’s [...] Read more.

Sir Geoffrey Hill, long hailed as Britain’s greatest living poet, was devoted to remembering the deceased, those forgotten in the debased din of mass culture—some of them worthy of our emulation, others edifying by their “folly” or “criminality” (Paris Review interview). Hill’s recent death, on 30 June 2016, presents an apt time to remember his own life-work. In its act of memorial as homage, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy marks a departure for Hill: whereas his earlier work often rests in ambiguity, Péguy labors through the ambiguity—through characteristically antiphonal tones of voice, rhythms, and images—and concludes in affirmation, a note of hope, which points in the direction of some of his later work. Through all of his complexity, Péguy’s life—like Hill’s poem—conforms to a kenotic, Christological pattern and is thus worthy of our emulation. Full article

(This article belongs to the Special Issue English Poetry and Christianity)

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