Religious Poet Research Articles

George Herbert: Richness in Austerity

G E O R G E H E R B E R T : R I C H N E S S I N A U S T E R I T Y ROSALIE E. OSMOND Dalhousie University A he English religious poet of the late Renaissance inherited a large body of theories and beliefs, both literary and theological, that affected his poetic practice. He was subject to two completely opposed views of poetry as a whole, one of which saw it as a moral force, winning the mind “ from wicked­ ness to vertue” ;1 the other of which saw it as a web of lies, written by the devil. Even if he conceded the moral virtue of poetry in general, this merely led to further questions, stemming in large part from the medieval res¡verba controversy, about how this quality could best be realized through poetic method. An emphasis on matter fitted nicely with the concept of religious poetry as God-directed and therefore judged primarily according to the inten­ tion of the heart. If, however, religious poetry were to be man-directed as well, a persuasive power for good, then style and execution came to be of greater importance. To persuade, the religious poet must learn eloquence. But what kind of eloquence? The contrasting claims of the ornate and plain styles in literature found their religious counterparts in the ornate, ritualistic, and corporate worship pattern of Roman Catholicism and the plain, icono­ clastic, and individual worship pattern of Puritanism. These, in turn, were based on two very different views about how one reached God and about the use of earthly means in doing so. For the Catholic, earthly beauty, as a reflection of heavenly beauty, was acceptable in the service of God. For the Puritan, the distance between the earthly image and the reality was so great that the former was not so much a reflection of the latter as an unholy parody of it, and as such it had to be rejected completely. These inter-related and yet contradictory views about poetry and worship were fairly universal in the period, but George Herbert re-enacted in a peculiar way in his own life many of the conflicts and tensions, both literary and religious, of the preceding centuries. His education was classical, and as the culmination of a successful academic career, he became orator at Cam­ bridge. In this role, he not only had to be acquainted with the claims of ornate style; he had to practice it. And one can assume that he knew at first hand its usefulness for flattery, and the treacheries of its deception. We can never E n g l is h S t u d ie s in C anada, vi, 2, Summer 1980 know enough for the reasons that led him to abandon this life and the hope of court preferment for the Church, but when he did so, he did so wholly. One of the results of this was the abandonment of conscious eloquence. In the section on preaching in The Country Parson he gives various practical rules for securing the attention of the congregation, but concludes “he [the Preacher] is not witty, or learned, or eloquent, but Holy. A Character, that Hermogenes never dream’d of, and therefore he could give no precepts thereof.” 2 His position and practice in the Church of England also was at the point of tension between the simple and the sophisticated, the pietistic and the ritualistic. His friendship with Nicholas Ferrar emphasizes this dichotomy. The Little Gidding community, beset by contradictions, was perceived in wholly opposite ways. It was the “Arminian nunnery” with its austere, worksoriented yet ritualistic pattern of life. The Psalms, beloved of the Puritans, were the basis of the daily worship pattern; yet Nicholas Ferrar condemned extemporaneous prayer, and women of the community spent much time mak­ ing illustrated books of the Gospels. The pattern of life was monastic, with daily services, but only occasionally was there a priest present. Nicholas Ferrar himself never proceeded beyond the order of deacon. Herbert’s poetry is achieved, both consciously and to some extent uncon­ sciously, out of these many contradictory elements that come...

George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets

George Herbert and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Poets

Negativity and Language in the Religious Poetry of R. S. Thomas

Thus spoke a young man to a vicar in H. G. Wells' novel Babes in the Darkling Wood, and if we substitute Welsh peasants, barren moors and cold country churches for the sacrificial lambs, serpents, and fig-leaves, the could probably be hurled with equal truth at R. S. Thomas by the reader. What strikes one most powerfully about Thomas as priest-poet is the seeming absence of a creed, or a fundamental statement of apparent unbelief which conflicts radically with traditional Christian assumptions regarding the nature of God and belief. The fact is all the more curious when one recalls that Thomas has been a practising priest for over thirty years. Yet the nature of religious experience in the verse is peculiarly ambivalent, enigmatic and negative in tone. In the poem H'm, the preacher's inarticulation, his inability to speak of God's love, illustrates the readers' perspective on Thomas as a religious poet.

That one must speak lightly… A Study of Stevie Smith

It is likely enough that if some Catholic controversialist of the early seventeenth century had been discussing the merits of various contemporary poets, he would have extolled Crashaw and Southwell, deplored Donne, and vacillated in his opinion of Alabaster according to whether the gentleman was imprisoned in England for the Faith or had returned to the Anglican Church and a wife after differences with the Inquisition. Blame or approval would have been a matter of ‘party’ loyalty; not of poetry. The position was honourable enough in time of adversity but one we should attempt to outgrow. Such a simplistic attitude to religious belief is almost certainly an important factor in accounting for the intellectual and emotional poverty of religious art. One has heard the remark that dismisses Sutherland because he has lapsed, as if integrity as an artist depended on Easter Communion. It is tempting to inquire how many of the great figures of the Renaissance were certifiably in a state of grace.Thus it comes about that in March 1971 we lost one of the very few religious poets of our time and it is doubtful whether anyone noticed. She herself would not have been surprised:I cannot imagine anything nicerThan to be struck by lightning and killed suddenlycrossing a field As if somebody cared.

A Trilogy on Wisdom and Celibacy by J. Massingbert Ford

598 BOOK BEVIEWS Brooks, and Elizabeth Jennings. He also observes that Mark Van Doren, Elder Olson and Yvor Winters seem to believe everything that a Christian should believe "except the Christian Faith itself." But the problem of religious poets is greater now than ever before, for, as Auden says, there is a lack of belief in the endurance of the physical, the reality of the evidence of the senses, the perdurance of human nature, and the loss of the public realm as the sphere in which personal deeds are actually revealed. Nor does the traditional shoptalk of Catholicism engage with modern life and the " unbaptized raw material of our time." After examining the work of professedly Christian poets, most of whom are either Roman Catholic or Anglican, Fairchild asks what the future may hold for a Christian poetry that appears to be " often submerged in the Situation which it seeks to amend." And his conclusion is scarcely comforting in tone: " Quantitatively it is almost negligible in comparison with the output of writers who ignore or oppose supernatural religion. Qualitatively, it is torn between the dread of pious triteness and the dread of heresy; the desire to edify and the desire to make works of art; the desire to communicate and the desire to be modishly inexplicit. These conflicts can be exhausting." To those who may share Professor Fairchild's devotion to classical Christian orthodoxy, but not his use of labels and his delight in the abusing of the various shades of " romanticism," this book will prove at times irritatingly simplistic in its judgments. But it is nonetheless an imposing enterprise in apologetics supported by an equally imposing array of literary historical scholarship in a tradition of which this volume may be the last example ever to appear. Providence College Providence, R. I. PAUL VAN K. THOMSON A Trilogy on Wisdom and Celibacy. By J. MASSINGBERT FoRD. Notre Dame & London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967. Pp. 256. $7.95. This attractively-produced book sets out to challenge four common assumptions: 1) " that the words bethulah, parthenos and virgo denote virginitas intacta" (they have, in fact, the author says, wider connotations than is generally believed, and the contexts in which they appear must be scrutinized to discover whether they should bear the meaning of " youthfulness " or " celibacy ") . 2) "that from the earliest times these terms in the Latin and Greek BOOK REVIEWS 599 tongue were used as frequently, or more frequently, in reference to women than to men" (in fact, linguistic evidence suggests that the word parthenos was used as frequently for men as for women, and that the word eunuchos was the most common word for a celibate man). 3) "that the earliest written record of Christian teaching on celibacy is found in I Cor. 7, and that the recipients of this epistle included a group of women (and possible men) celibates who had already established themselves in the newly founded Christian community at Corinth " (in reality I Cor. 7 is speaking of young widows and widowers living in a Jewish-Christian community which clings rather tenaciously to traditional social patterns, class distinctions and questions that exercised Jewish teachers both before and after Paul). 4) "that numerous Christians contemporary with Jesus (for example, Paul and some of the disciples) and also those of the sub-apostolic age embraced lives of consecrated celibacy" (in fact, these do not appear to have embraced any form of absolute celibacy). Mrs. Ford's conclusions are based on a striking familiarity with exegetical writings and techniques and with rabbinical sources. There is not, she states, any clear reference to the practice of celibacy among peoples of the Jewish faith in the pre-Christian era. (pp. 23-58) As for the Christian era, celibacy became practical and popular only in the mid-third century, which is much later than the time usually assigned to it. Chapters on celibacy in the New Testament (pp. 59-128), in the writings of the subapostolic Fathers and of the Apologists (pp. 129-145), in those of Clement of Alexandria and Origen (pp. 146-164) and of Tertullian (pp. 165-215), serve amply to document her point. For Dr. Ford, indeed...

Dante: Poet of the Secular World

Erich Auerbach's Dante: Poet of the Secular World is an inspiring introduction to one of world's greatest poets as well as a brilliantly argued and still provocative essay in the history of ideas. Here Auerbach, thought by many to be the greatest of twentieth-century scholar-critics, makes the seemingly paradoxical claim that it is in the poetry of Dante, supreme among religious poets, and above all in the stanzas of his Divine Comedy, that the secular world of the modern novel first took imaginative form. Auerbach's study of Dante, a precursor and necessary complement to Mimesis, his magisterial overview of realism in Western literature, illuminates both the overall structure and the individual detail of Dante's work, showing it to be an extraordinary synthesis of the sensuous and the conceptual, the particular and the universal, that redefined notions of human character and fate and opened the way into modernity.

Amado Nervo, Mexico's Religious Poet

Amado Nervo, Mexico's Religious Poet

Amado Nervo: Mexico's Religious Poet

Amado Nervo: Mexico's Religious Poet

The Conflict of Moral Obligation in the Trilogy of Aeschylus

It will be generally admitted, I think, that Aeschylus is one of the great religious and philosophic poets of all time. And it will be perhaps hardly less generally conceded that no philosophic problem was for him more interesting or more momentous than that of establishing and defending the concept of a moral government of the world. Even those who accuse him of having subjected all things to the iron rule of Fate cannot reproach him with a blind fatalism. If he saw inexorable Necessity at the heart of the world, he also saw Justice writ large upon its face; and if he believed God and man alike to be pawns in the hands of Destiny, the rule of the game was still to punish the wrong moves of the one by the sure interposition of the other.