John Henry Newman and the Oxford Movement: A Poet of the Church

Abstract

The paper examines John Henry Newman and the extent to which his involvement with the Oxford Movement influenced his poetic endeavours. The analysis of the historical and theological background of the Movement from Newman’s perspective makes the task of presenting the genesis of Newman’s poetic conceptions much easier. Newman was famous for being a preternaturally gifted preacher and prose writer, while his poetic texts received less attention. The examination of poetry is carried out here by contrasting the Oxford Movement’s ideas, majorly Newman’s own ideas and poetry, with Romanticism as the high guardian of Imagination and furor poeticus. While the Romantic poets craved authenticity and defied the laws of imitative modes of expression, the devotional poets of that time oftentimes leaned on mimesis. The paper’s objective, therefore, is to help define the prominence of imitative elements in Newman’s poetry and their impact on the quality of his verse.