Ecstasy and Understanding
Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period
- 196 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Ecstasy and Understanding
Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period
About this book
This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so.
The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- 1 Gerard Manley Hopkins as religious conduit in Geoffrey Hill, George Mackay Brown and Edwin Muir
- 2 From the beauty of religion to the religion of beauty: Catholicism and aestheticism in fin-de-siecle poetry
- 3 The heart's censer: liturgy, poetry and the Catholic devotional revolution
- 4 Hymns in a man's life: the Congregational chapel and D. H. Lawrence's early poetry
- 5 Slouching towards Bethlehem: Yeats, Eliot, and the Modernist Apocalypse
- 6 'The unattended moment': selfhood and the experience of the transcendent in Four Quartets
- 7 'If/Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead': forgiveness and the body in Auden's post-conversion poems
- 8 Kathleen Raine's song of the living soul
- 9 The sacrificial victim in David Jones's In Parenthesis
- 10 'For the failure of language there is no redress': R.S. Thomas, poetry and prayer
- 11 The metaphysical joke: church going with Philip Larkin
- 12 'Metamorphic power': Geoffrey Hill and Gerard Manley Hopkins
- 13 Simone Weil among the poets
- 14 Unpropitious: Christian poetry and 'now'
- Index