She avoids terms like 'inspiration', 'ecstasy', sticking to particulars - words, meanings - rather than ideology or theory. A collection of studies of writers and mystics past and present, the book brings literary judgement to bear on a subject neglected in a secular age. Though her first concern is poetry, she draws on prose writers to effect her penetrating explorations.
This collection studies writers and mystics, past and present. The text provides readings of Jennings's chosen authors and offers clues to her own poetry. Writers considered include: St Augustine; St Teresa of Avila; George Herbert; T.S. Eliot; Charles Peguy; Simone Weil; Gerald Manley Hopkins; David Gascoyne; Julian of Norwich; St John of the Cross; Henry Vaughan; Thomas Traherne; Rainer Maria Rilke; Edwin Muir; Hart Crane; and Wallace Stevens.’ David Gascoyne she considered 'the only living English poet, apart from Eliot, in the true mystical tradition.’ ‘If not directly influenced by it,’ she wrote, ‘his work undoubtedly leads back to the visionary poetry of Vaughan, Herbert and Traherne.'
In Christianity and Poetry (1965) she also considered the influence of religion on literature':
'Poets and mystics who have experienced some close, personal but supra-rational awareness of God have always carried away from such moments of illumination an increased subtlety, a profoundly original understanding of human experience and of the apparent contradictions even in the physical universe.’ … ‘Poetry is not rationalization but revelation and what is healing in it, both for the poet and his readers, is the ability to depict conflict at its most vulnerable point.' ’While frequently making parallels between poetry and religion, Jennings teases out the differences between the mystic and the poet: the poet wants to communicate ordinary experience while the mystic moves away from it.’
‘Christianity Today (1965) was what she called a ‘personal book’, dealing with ‘problems of taste and fashion, dogma and belief, style and form, tradition and the avant-garde’. She confronted the danger of the Christian label, with its associations of didacticism and moralizing. For her, it was about taking a Christian lens to all subjects, following on from Chaucer, Milton, Dryden, Patmore, Hopkins and T.S. Eliot. She refers to Peter Levi being a Jesuit, W.H. Auden’s piece ‘Christianity and Poetry’ in The Dyer’s Hand and David Jones’ application of his Catholic heritage to his poetry and painting. The chapters are titled: Anglo-Saxon; Middle English; The Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries; The Seventeenth Century; The Eighteenth Century; The Nineteenth Century; Women’s Visionary Poets – Emily Bronte and Emily Dickinson; The Twentieth Century. “Foreigners and Mystics’ that includes Dante, Claudel, Peguy and Baudelaire.’
From a similar time period Modern Religious Verse edited by Tim Beaumont and An Anthology of Religious Verse edited by Norman Nicholson provide an interesting range of poets and approaches to religious poetry. Beaumont says of his selection that his choices are ‘typical of modern poetry’ and also ‘of modern religious feeling’. As a result, there is a strong emphasis on poems of doubt and poems of protest, with a consequent lack of ‘cultic or worshipping poems’. In his choices he drew heavily on poems published in Prism, as selected by Nicholas Mosley. Poets included are: W.H. Auden, D.C. Barker, Thomas Blackburn, James Brabazon, Edwin Brock, Roy Campbell, Charles Causley, G.K. Chesterton, E.E. Cummings, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, Peter Firth, David Gascoyne, Helen Grundy, Alec D. Hope, L.E. Jones, Peter Levi, E.L. Mascall, John Masefield, Edwin Muir, Valerie Pitt, Ruth Pitter, F. Pratt Green, John Press, Dylan Thomas, Chad Walsh, Charles Williams.
Nicholson writes that to ‘many modern poets the events of Our Lord’s life are so vivid that they seem to be contemporary, so that it is natural for them to write in the language, imagery and form of our time.’ The structure of his book deals with modern conceptions of God and of life in relation to God. Poets included are: W.H. Auden, Hilaire Belloc, S.L. Bethell, G.K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, Clifford Dyment, T.S. Eliot, George Every, M. Farrow, David Gascoyne, Thomas Hardy, Rayner Heppenstall, G.M. Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence, Andrew Murray, Norman Nicholson, J.D.C. Pellow, Ruth Pitter, Anne Ridler, Michael Roberts, Walter Roberts, John Short, Tambimuttu, Allen Tate, Dylan Thomas, Charles Williams, W.B. Yeats and Andrew Young.
‘Mark Van Doren (June 13, 1894 – December 10, 1972) was an American poet, writer and critic, apart from being a scholar and a professor of English at Columbia University for nearly 40 years, where he inspired a generation of influential writers and thinkers including Thomas Merton, Robert Lax, John Berryman, Whittaker Chambers, and Beat Generation writers such as Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.’
'This was the time of Vatican II and Ed Rice's Jubilee magazine when a springtime of the church was celebrated in art, poetry and deep spirituality extending to all faiths - all this jubilation aided and abetted by Merton and Lax.' (Ned O'Gorman, blurb for 'Merton and Friends')
Van Doren taught that only religious poetry can be truly great. David Zlotnick reported on an address given by Van Doren to an Undergraduate Newman Club audience where he argued that "if poetry is about the world, religious poetry is about the universe":
‘"Today," he said, "we have narrowed and specialized the function of poetry," and tend to think of the Hymn as being symbolic of religious poetry. Professor Van Doren, however, finds it "the weakest and least moving form of religious poetry," because it is a limited form. Great religious poetry, he indicated, is poetry or prose which has emerged after struggle, conflict, and "terrific drama" have taken place in the souls of the authors, as they search for God. Expanding his thesis that those who initially fight most within themselves are, after coming to the truth, the most religious of people, Professor Van Doren emphasized that "God is very difficult to understand." "God did a tremendous thing when he made us free to hate him—he could have made us unfree to hate him. Yet," Professor Van Doren went on, referring to Lucretius' criticism of religion, "there is nothing like an attack on religion to reveal its power.”'
‘Merton, Lax, and Rice ‘were college buddies who became life-long friends, literary innovators, and spiritual iconoclasts.’
‘Merton, who died some 30 years before the other two, was the first to achieve fame with his best-selling spiritual autobiography, The Seven-Story Mountain. Lax, whom Jack Kerouac dubbed "one of the great original voices of our times," eventually received recognition as one of "America's greatest experimental poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words" (New York Times Book Review). He spent most of the last 35 years of his life living frugally on one of the remotest of the Greek isles. After Jubilee folded, Rice wrote 20 books on world culture, religion, and biography. His 1970 biography of Merton, The Man in the Sycamore Tree, was judged too intimate, forthright, and candid by those who, in Lax's words, "were trying so hard to get pictures of [Merton's] halo that they missed his face." His biography of the 19th century explorer and "orientalist" Sir Richard Burton became a New York Times bestseller.’
'Merton was a prolific poet, religious writer, and essayist whose diversity of work has rendered a precise definition of his life and an estimation of the significance of his career difficult.' ‘Merton corresponded with an extraordinary range of writers, among them Evelyn Waugh, Henry Miller, Jacques Maritain, Walker Percy and William Carlos Williams. He spoke out boldly against political oppression, social injustice, racism and nuclear weapons, and expressed solidarity with Boris Pasternak, Czeslaw Milosz and James Baldwin. His letters to Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and to Argentine feminist Victoria Ocampo reflect his deep love of Latin American culture.’
'Lax pursued an approach to life he called pure act - a way of living in the moment that was both spontaneous and practiced, God-inspired and self-chosen. By devoting himself to simplicity, poverty and prayer, he expanded his capacity for peace, joy and lovewhile producing distinctive poetry of such stark beauty critics called him "one of America's greatest experimental poets" and "one of the new 'saints' of the avant-garde."'
In his introduction to Upholding Mystery, his 1997 anthology of contemporary Christian poetry, David Impastato argues that nothing is off-limits to the Christian poet who is equally comfortable with the “polyphony of self” as with the notion of history as ‘a web of narratives floating rather free of historical fact, if there is such a thing as fact.’ Such poetry, he suggests, seeks ‘to understand human personhood less in the conventional realms of “self” than in relation to the “other,” to community, and to the shaping of tradition.’ Finally, there is an acceptance of the universe ‘as a mystery beyond the reach of rational or scientific constructs.’
‘From Andrew Hudgins's often humorous narratives to Geoffery Hill's darkly impassioned lyrics, from Denise Levertov's incisive personal and political insights to Wendell Berry's lovely evocations of the divine presence in nature, the book provides generous selections of work by such well-known poets as Richard Wilbur, Annie Dillard, Daniel Berrigan, Les Murray, Louise Erdrich, and Kathleen Norris, along with the impressive though less known voices of David Craig, David Citino, Scott Cairns, Maura Eichner, and David Brendan Hopes. Together the anthology's fifteen poets have created what critic Jonathan Holden calls a "revolutionary core" of work that is recognized equally for the stature of its verse and for its illumination of the Christian ethos. By limiting the number of poets to fifteen rather than presenting the usual broad sampling, this unique collection allows readers to gain a thorough familiarity with each poet's work to see the struggle, discovery, and transformation of the spiritual quest throughout an individual body of verse, yet still to see how each poet contributes to a vision of the sacred that can be understood only in diversity, in the very contrast between one voice and another.’
Here ‘is a contemporary encounter with Christian mystery, in poetry that is as vibrant, as compelling, and as meaningful as any being written today’ ‘showing that the transcendent is indeed alive and well in the hands of contemporary poets, despite reports to the contrary.’
In Faith, Hope and Poetry Malcolm Guite, by means of a critical appreciation and analysis of particular poems from across the vast span of English literature beginning with The Dream of the Rood and ending with the work of Seamus Heaney, explores the idea that transfigured vision is fundamental to the experience both of writing and reading poetry, while arguing that the transfiguring of vision through a revitalized imagination is a common task for science, poetry, and theology. Foundational to this argument are Guite’s detailed and insightful readings of firstly The Dream of the Rood, followed by works from the pens of Shakespeare, Davies, Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, Milton, Coleridge, Hardy, Larkin, Hill, and Heaney.
Faith, Hope and Poetry seeks 'to show that a study of poetic imagination turns out to be a form of theology; that in seeking to understand how multiple meanings come to be’ bodied forth’ in finite poems which ‘grow to something of great constancy’ we discover a new understanding of the prime embodiment of all meaning which is the Incarnation. And this new understanding of incarnation in its turn gives us a new confidence in the ultimate significance of our own acts of poetic embodiment. But if poetry as a manifestation of particular embodiment speaks of the immanence of God, then poetry as a means of cleansing and transfiguring vision speaks of God’s transcendence.'
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Jennings - Friends.
