The Material and the Divine: Entwined Aesthetics in Alice Meynell’s ‘The Two Poets’

Abstract

Alice Meynell’s adherence to a reserved lyrical mode could be read as a desire to maintain a sense of teleological order, in which the ironic timelessness of the lyrical moment reinforces the divine purpose of the material. However, the silences and reserve for which Meynell’s work is known instead reinforce paradoxical moments of trauma that are held up and unspoken as impossible to understand within the human experience. The intensity of the lyric depends on the visceral yet disturbingly silent recognition of an aesthetic predicated on violence. From this perspective, the poem becomes a theological and aesthetic space in which a transformative encounter takes place, one that is predicated on human contact that confronts each subject’s understanding of the world and their position within it. Importantly, Meynell’s poetry, like her theology, rests on paradoxes — of theology and aesthetics; of the material and the divine; of the temporal and the eternal; of violence and beauty — in such a way that creates mutual, dynamic spaces rather than a binary structure that defines and divides.