Where the Centaur Walks: Psalms and the Poetic Imagination

Abstract

The ‘redress of poetry as poetry,’ means, according to the Irish poet and Noble Prize winner Seamus Heaney, an awareness of ‘an eminence established and a pressure exercised by distinctly linguistic means.’ Poetry, he asserts, ‘is the imagination pressing back against the pressure of reality.’ The imagination of Psalms poetry needs to be rediscovered. This has begun with the monumental book by Dobbs-Allsopp (2015). Yet, more work is needed. This article explores how the Psalter, being poetry, makes claims to and on the imagination, reality, and the confluence thereof. It is an attempt to see how the redress of Psalms poetry might refine our reading of the biblical book. Psalm 98 serves as key illustration.