FEATURED AUTHOR—ALBERT STEWART "Be my inscape, be my lyre": The Hymnody of Albert Stewart________ Marianne Worthington To read the poems of Albert Stewart is to consider his organic religiosity, a blended spiritual view or his own making. Stewart mixes Greek mythology, Biblical free verse, medieval mysticism, British Romanticism, American Transcendentalism, and the folkways of his Knott County, Kentucky neighbors like a great stew, flavored with a pantheistic theology and a fervor for the aesthetic and spiritual dimensions of nature. Stewart's poetry is not always easy or forthcoming; his early work often contains indirection and veiled allusion, inverted syntax, and obtrusive, sentimental descriptors that make for a stilted and distant voice. Generally, however, it's worth the dig because Stewart is a poet with a keen eye and an inquisitive nature; a poet who celebrates and laments the human condition; a poet dedicated to the medieval notion of finding the sacred while in the midst of the profane. In many ways, Stewart's poems can be likened to hymns in that they are lyric offerings that express a theological point of view, a heightened imagination, and passion and reverence for the sublime. We may not be able literally to sing his poems, but Stewart was aware of the need for congregational song: "I am looking / For the one to whom it must be told," he writes in "The Holy Season." We might think of Stewart's poetry as lyric containers for his invocations, confessions, praises, petitions, litanies, and creeds. Albert Stewart was 86 years old when he died in April, 2001. He left us only three volumes of poetry, but many Kentucky writers name him as their literary mentor in one way or another. No doubt, his classical training at the Settlement School and his education at Berea College and the University of Kentucky offered him opportunities beyond Yellow Mountain, his home place in Knott County. He served three years in the navy during World War II and taught at high schools in northern Kentucky and southern Ohio and at Morehead State University, University of Kentucky and Alice Lloyd College. Yet he always returned to Yellow Mountain, and most of his poems are rooted there. 25 In 1962, Morehead State College Press published Stewart's first collection, The Untoward Hills. Twenty-five years later, it republished a facsimile edition. In 1993, Berea College Press published Stewart's second collection, The Holy Season: Walking in the Wild. In 1996, Limited Editions Press published A Man of Circumstance & Selected Yellow Mountain Poems 1946-1996. The Untoward Hills is marked in obvious and subtle ways as a spiritual journey. The first section, "The Hills of a Child" features poems where the solitary and lonely childhood on a mountain farm is centered around loss. The poet begins to look to nature as a substitute for parental guidance (Stewart was sent to live at the Hindman Settlement School at age five after the death of his mother) and as a way of knowing the world. The title poem of this section is a representative example of Stewart's epistemology of nature and of his poetic style. It is reprinted on page 8 of this magazine. Here we see not only the poetic tension of the bright "little lives" of insects and children being contrasted with the coming dark, but also some of the hallmarks of Stewart's early style and influences: the use of end rhyme but with irregular meter, allegiance to the Romantic notion of human activity conditioned by nature, and a fondness for Biblical cadence, as in the second stanza above. The knowledge of "bright things gone away" is emphasized in the next section of this collection. "The Outlying Hills" contains elegies and tributes that are pensive and sensitive responses to death and the passing of time. In "Mountain Funeral," for instance, a family prepares a coffin that Stewart describes in a hymn-like meter: Of curly pine from off the height This coffin shall be made To house the frugal shade Of one who fled into the hills of light. They praise with zeal the morbid shade In weeping and in psalm And have the bitter coffin made To guide the...