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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 September 2014
Poetry, understood the way Icons are, teaches its readers and writers how words make relationships, put people, places, things in one another's presence. In the relationship called religious, poetry takes on a very crucial task, that of mediating an experience, the human of the divine, the divine of the human, in the various traditions, like the Icon in Orthodoxy. Poetry creates nonreligious relationships too, but uses the same manner of making someone present to something or someone. Poetry becomes anti-presence in religious traditions that deny experience of God. In Christianity of a sacramental kind, poetry is the Icon of language, beauty/truth inseparably set out, the loss of one jeopardizing the existence of the other, language refusing to be idolatrous, and equally, refusing to be inane. Religious understanding in sacramental Christianity requires the poetic Icon.
1 Hart, Ray, Unfinished Man and the Imagination (New York: Herder & Herder, 1968), p. 227Google Scholar. “The poet's grasp of the event and his verbal articulation of it are indistinguishable: he knows in expressing. Here is an analogue of the role of imagination in revelation: the poet's imagination discloses that by which it is finally solicited.”
2 Cf., The Death Notebooks (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1974), p. 61Google Scholar.
3 Cf., Prison Poems (Santa Barbara: Unicorn Press, 1973), p. 6Google Scholar.
4 Cf., Maximum Security Ward (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1970), pp. 102–103Google Scholar.
5 Cf., Crow (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 2Google Scholar.
6 Cf., Ani Maamin: A Song Lost and Found Again (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 105–107Google Scholar.
7 Cf., Gold Country (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1973), p. 59Google Scholar.
8 Cf., Von Balthasar, Hans Urs, La Gloire et La Croix, trans, of Herrlicheit by Givord, Robert (Paris: Aubier, 1965), p. 28Google Scholar, for a nearly ecstatic statement of how knowledge of the figure of Jesus affects the lives of His disciples. The five volumes of Von Balthasar express in detail this primary insight into a figure, and constitute a study of Christian theology from an esthetic point of view.
9 The Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version (London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, Ltd., 1957), p. 419Google Scholar.
10 Cf., Diving Into the Wreck (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 5Google Scholar.
11 Cf., Williams, Oscar, ed., A Pocket Book of Modern Verse (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), p. 391Google Scholar.
12 Miller, J. Hillis, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1963), Chap. VI, esp. p. 282Google Scholar.
13 Levertov, Denise, The Poet in the World (New York: New Directions, 1973), p. 14Google Scholar.
14 Riding, Laura, Selected Poems in Five Sets (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970), p. 12Google Scholar.
15 For an analysis of the way western thought and especially French philosophy has “as its constant tradition to devaluate the image, and psychologically the function of imagination ‘mistress of errors and falsity’“ cf., Durand, Gilbert, Les Structures Anthropologiques de I'Imaginaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963), pp. 11–56Google Scholar. The rest of the book attempts to restore the credibility of imaginative cognition.
16 Cf. Evdokimov, Paul, L'Art de l'Icône: Théologie de la Beauté (Bruges: Desclée de Brouwer, 1972)Google Scholar.
17 Ibid., p. 15.
18 Von Balthasar, , La Gloire et La Croix, p. 16Google Scholar. “… beauté qui (comme il apparaît aujourd'hui) exige au moins autant de courage et de décision que la verité et la bonté, et que l'on ne peut proscrire et séparer de ses soeurs, sans attirer sur soi leur vengeance mystérieuse.”
19 I am referring to Ted Hughes' volume Crow. My review of it may be found in The New Orleans Review 3, 2, p. 202.
20 Cf. Penguin Modern Poets 6 (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1964), pp. 105–107Google Scholar. The important lines are: “I fought to do the hard thing / / Well but the Evil within / Me fought back. I lay awake hearing / Them scream. I committed the sin of pity? For Evil every time I touched / Their brittle limbs. In my dreams I was / Watching my infant sister crawled on by stick / Insects with human faces. / Gas was like incense; it drowned corruption. In / / The wind or in cylinders / To be raised and used it became a / Presence more real than His. Above my bed / His tense eyes looked down while I slept and / Forgave or condemned. His enormous / Words on the air proved that He still existed / And surely cared: but I held / A scarred ikon close to my heart which showed Him / Massacred in the streets by / The Blood of Evil.”
21 Cf., Merciful Disguises (New York: Atheneum, 1973), p. 56Google Scholar.
22 Cf., “The Secret of Poetry,” In Sepia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1974), p. 25Google Scholar.
23 Cf., Durand, , Les Structures Anthropologiques de l'Imaginaire, p. 464Google Scholar. “Or la poésie comme le mythe est inaliénable. Le plus humble des mots, la plus étroîte compréhension du plus étroit des signes, est messager malgré lui d'une expression qui nimbe toujours le sens propre objectif. Bien loin de nous irriter, ce ‘luxe’ poétique, cette impossibilite à ‘démythfier’ la conscience se presente comme la chance de l'esprit, et constitue ce ‘beau risque à courir’ que Socrate, en un instant décisif, oppose au néant objectif de la mort, affirmant al a fois les droits du mythe et la vocation de la subjectivité à l'Etre et à la liberté qui la manifeste. Tant il n'y a d'honneur véritable, pour l'homme, que celui des poètes.”
24 Cf., Vergote, Antoine, The Religious Man (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1969), p. 42Google Scholar. “We have said that the religious experience is a grasp, in all that is human and terrestrial, of the impact of the Other. This Other is the prop of existence, the horizon of the true reality to which the passing phenomena of life should be referred, the absolute owner of all human existence.” Vergote's book is a transformation of Freudian interpretation into a system of religious explanation which is open to the History of Religions as well as to sociological data.
25 (New York: New Directions, 1974), p. 40.
26 (New York: Doubleday, 1971), pp. 35-43. “5. Alarums and Fanfares for the King's Supper” / / Professional help, Cripes, yes! / You've got a clear mind / and a good body / and being a saint wears the hell out of you. / Out of me / is what I mean. / There was this girl, / see, / with long black hair and everything. / (This is complicated, I think) Well, anyhow, her hair was long and black / and always moving / like a black light or a dark water / or a mind looking and looking / but the thing is it was moving changing forming / (on the wind) a new word / to tell me / ask me / what what / what do y ou want / what is it / what what / say it only say it / then— / you know how it is— / the darkness was too much or something / and I said, / hell, what about having a peanut butter sandwich / for lunch tomorrow / while she stood there / handing me pieces of her heart she had chunked out / with her thumbnail and— / understandably— / she turned away, sick. / Well hell, yes. / Bring it on. I could use / some professional help. / (he lapses) / (Move a little and I'll slip it in).”
27 (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), p. 9. “The Resurrection.” Esp. the lines: “Thomas Merton loved a woman, somebody in a bar told me / one morning in New York. As a kid? I asked, Or as a monk? / But they wouldn't say. I screamed It is important! / The bartender told me to leave. I watched the sun come up / alone by the Hudson River. I think I'll preach on Magdalen.”
28 Berryman, John, Delusions, Etc. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1972)Google Scholar, esp. “He Resigns,” p. 40. “Age and the deaths, and the ghosts. / Her having gone away / in spirit from me. Hosts / of regrets come & find me empty / / I don't feel this will change. / I don't want any thing / or person, familiar or strange. / I don't think I will sing / / anymore just now; / or ever. I must start / to sit with a blind brow / above an empty heart.” Gildner, Gary, Nails (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1975), p. 13Google Scholar.
29 (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 98.
30 Ibid., pp. 6 and 118.
31 Table Talk with the Recent God (New York: Paulist Press, 1974), p. 16Google Scholar.
32 Final song of the Christus from “Oratorio For An Apocalypse,” published in Denver Quarterly (Summer, 1977).
33 “The Earth,” The Awful Rowing Toward God (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1975), p. 25Google Scholar.
34 Gardner, Helen, Religion and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 121–142Google Scholar, “Religious Poetry: a Definition.”
35 Cf. Avery, Dulles S.J., Models of the Church (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 69Google Scholar. “Yet it remains true that sacramentalism, carried to excess, can induce an attitude of narcissistic aestheticism that is not easily reconcilable with a full Christian commitment to social and ethical values.” Also p. 184. “The third model, the sacramental, could lead to a sterile aestheticism and to an almost narcissistic self-contemplation.”
36 Poems of St. John of the Cross, tr. Barnstone, Willis (New York: New Directions, 1972), p. 57Google Scholar.
37 Cf. Morel, GeorgesLe Sens De L'Existence Selon S. Jean De La Croix, III vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1961), III, p. 37Google Scholar. “Le langage métaphysique (ou mystique) n'est donc de l'ordre ni du concept-entendement ni du mythe. Concept et mythe n'en sont que les deux formes représentatives. Ce langage original nous le nommons symbole. Un tel terme est d'une extrême précision: en effet, ce qui est entendu ici comme symbole est la forme suprême du langage, plus exactement le langage dans son essence universelle et concrète.”
38 Interior Castle, tr. Peers, E. Allison (New York: Doubleday Image Book, 1961)Google Scholar, Sixth Mansions, Chap. VII, pp. 169–178. Esp. p. 174. “It is true that anyone whom Our Lord brings to the seventh Mansion very rarely, or never, needs to engage in this activity [self aid], for the reason that I shall set down, if I remember to do so, when I come to deal with that Mansion, where in a wonderful way the soul never ceases to walk with Christ our Lord but is ever in the company of both His Divine and His human nature.”
39 Cf., Manigne, J. P. O.P., Pour Une Poétique De La Foi (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1969), pp. 45–56Google Scholar, and the concluding “Méditation Sur Le Mystère De La Transfiguration,” pp. 179–181.
40 Cf. Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Spirit of Eastern Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), Chap. 3Google Scholar. Also, Lazarev, Viktor, Storia della Pittura Bizantina, tr. Fossati, Guido (Torino: Einaudi, 1967), p. 23Google Scholar. “However the Byzantines were not attracted to the spiritual character of cult only, but also to its dazzling pomp, to the splendor of gold, silver, precious stones, polychrome marble. ‘If this dead earthly splendor—wrote Porphyry, Bishop of Gaza—is so splendid, what ought to be the splendor of the heavenly glory, prepared for the just!’ These words express evidentially the typically Byzantine tendency to interpret a rich cult not as an esthetic end in itself, but as a kind of sacrament which permits the soul a foretaste of all the joys and delights of heavenly beatitude. The Byzantines felt themselves at the apex of beatitude when hearing liturgical chant which moved them and exalted them, seeing burning innumerable lights, in whose reflection flickered the gold of mosaics, and observing the images of the saints and gospel scenes which adorned the vault, while from the iconostasis saints and ascetics looked at him, and priests richly vested used glittering apparel decorated with flowers, and from the pulpit the preacher expressed himself in the refined forms of the ancient eloquence … their souls flew to God, whose invisible presence they perceived in each consecrated particularity, in each tessera of the mosaic, in every note of the sung liturgy, in the clouds of incense.“ (My translation from the Italian.)
41 (Boston: David R. Godine, 1974), p. 27.
42 Ibid., p. 8.
43 Ibid., p. 5.
44 Cf. Sölle, Dorothee, Imagination et Obéissance, tr. Jarczyk, G. (Paris: Casterman, 1970), p. 13Google Scholar. “En aucun domaine les scléroses de la tradition n'ont eu de conséquence aussi grave que dans ce-lui de la formation de la conscience. Sous la dictature de normes et de schèmes de conduite bien établis, la sensibilité de la conscience dépérit comme une plante sans eau; même les cactus les plus sobres ne pourraient résister à des siécles de pareil traitement. Or le point qui a rendu possible pareille fossilisation, et auquel tout s'est réferé dans la formation de la conscience—dans l'une et l'autre des deux confessions, d'ailleurs, parmi les catholiques et les protestants, réunis ici en une belle unanimité pratique—c'est l'obéissance.”
45 MacLeish, Archibald, The Human Season, “If God is God from J.B.” (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972), p. 145Google Scholar.
46 Ibid., pp. 130–133.
47 Cf., “Faith and Poetry Issue,” New Catholic World 219, 1309 (January/February, 1976), p. 16Google Scholar. The poem is to accompany a gouache of the Jesuit Church on the University of San Francisco campus.