Book Review: Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The Power of the Word

Abstract

Poetry and the Religious Imagination: The of the Word. Edited by Francesca Bugliani Knox and David Lonsdale. Famham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing, 2015. xii + 268 pp. $109.95 (cloth).This valuable and unusual volume is the product of a 2011 Power of the Word conference held at Heythrop College, University of London. It provides North American readers with a valuable sample of the rich crossdisciplinary theological and literary scholarship being carried forward in Great Britain, especially in Scotland, by such groups as the Centre for Literature, Theology and the Arts at Glasgow University and the Institute for Theology, Imagination and the Arts at St. Andrews University.What is offered is a richly allusive set of essays, featuring an exemplary range of poets examined by an unusual range of academic and non-academic contributors. These contributors deliberately and deliberatively cross disciplinary lines, while still maintaining their own disciplinary integrity. Philosophers and theologians read literature as philosophers and theologians. Poets and poet-critics read philosophy and theology as poets and poet-critics. What emerges is a case study in effective cross-disciplinary reflection, one that illustrates the essential porousness of academic boundaries too often defended in North America as all but imperially sacrosanct.The collection includes an essay dealing directly with Aquinas as poet (in a surprising and exhilarating new take), as well as essays, as one would expect in such a volume, on more canonically recognizable poets-Dante, Shakespeare, Eliot, Rilke, and Levertov. But the breadth of allusion and ancillary reference-ranging from Hopkins and Heaney to Heidegger and Derrida- is large and often powerfully suggestive. The bibliographies following each essay are equally wide-ranging.In keeping with the Jesuit auspices of the 2011 symposium, Thomas Aquinas and Ignatius of Loyola are in many ways the tutelary spirits of this volume. Nonetheless, the collection reflects a Roman Catholic sensibility that is in fact catholic in the widest sense. How often does a reader find essays on Aquinas as Latin poet and Stevens as theologian manque in a single volume? (Olivier-Thomas Venard OP on Poetic Audacity in Thomas Aquinas, and John McDade assessing Wallace Stevens on God, Imagination and Reality.) And how often in a single essay does one come across detailed analyses of a film like Terrence Maliek's The Tree of Life and a project like the St. …