the Poetry Workshop web place

[Note: this draft will be edited to update it from its former version as an email course.]

The Problem of Prayer and Poetry

At first glance poetry is prayer as devotional poems are often to be found in prayer books. Yet this simple empirical identification conceals an important issue. When we pray we pray directly to God. Anything that gets in the way can and often does distract. Prayer is a sacramental and depends on our will. This is why we use icons, encourage the austerity of plainsong, ensure the words of liturgical devotion are almost the touchstone of tradition and promote decorum, silence and set symbolism in our places of worship. Now poetry like any other form of human expression is a natural ability. To paraphrase Henri de Lubac, it is an aspect of the setting out on our journey to God, not an aspect of our destination in God. Against the Platonists, poetry is not the fruit of divine inspiration, but the tough nut of constant revision and perspiration. The words of a prayer are only the vehicle of that impulse to love which carries us as close as possible to God, often through Mary or one of her Saints. An icon sacrifices similitude to tradition. A poem sacrifices tradition to similitude. The tradition of icon painting is fixed and spiritually dynamic. The tradition of poetry is open and naturally dynamic.

The question led to quite a serious debate in the early Twentieth Century when Henri Brémond brought out a book of the same title. It was prefaced with an allegory by Paul Claudel. In this story Prayer (Anima) is sought after by Poetry (Animus). He marries her. She lives faithfully with him. Until one day, Reality comes to the door and Prayer runs out to embrace it, leaving Poetry devastated and helpless. Poetry had once dominated poor uneducated Prayer, had even been unfaithful, now he was bereft. If you put aside any mix up with Jung, or Cocteau, what Bremond wanted to claim was that the ménage was possible because of a ‘pure’ poetry, abstract and not subsistent in itself that allowed for co-habitation. Bremond wanted to admit “mysticism” into the sphere of nature, as a human sentiment, yet to do so, he had to explore an abstract borderline between nature and grace, hence the dysfunctional family. I bring all this up because nothing beleaguers the reputation of Christian poetry more than a kind of mystical pantheism being substituted for genuine religion. Modernism, whether of the literary, or the theological kind, sought to harness the mystery of grace to the creativity of nature. Oddly enough, poets such as Eliot, Pound, Yeats, Rilke etc also linked themselves up to a very authoritarian view of man. It is as if the city of Plato has been overrun with poets and the saints have been exiled. This has done no service to poetry or religion.

Poetry has no access to the supernatural. Religious poetry in the Christian tradition seeks to make an authentic comparison with the life of religion, but it neither seeks to possess, nor speak for prayer. Even when poems are included in books of prayer, they inspire us to start prayer, rather than to read them as prayers. Poetry confusingly can borrow the form of prayer not always in irony, as in the concluding Canto of Dante’s Paradiso, or his version of the “Our Father,” in the Pugatorio, but even those great outpourings are not prayers. Hymns seem to be a borderline case. Yet what constitutes a hymn depends on a specialised metre and music. I know of few hymns that survive in worship that were not expressly written to be so. Some hymnodists were not good poets, Newman is an example. Some, such as Herbert, clearly distinguished devotional poetry from their hymns. In an age of secularity that has forgotten how to pray, hymns are bundled up with poetry as being about God and therefore about something else. The psalms and the Canticles themselves are hymns. They are verbal icons designed only to address God and even the most exacting study of their metre and origins has made no impact on their constant use in the Work of God. Of course an atheist would view an icon by Roubiliev as being just a painting and would read a hymn in the same way, but it would be dishonest if she, or he, were to claim that technically, there was no difference. Hymnody, church architecture and icon painting quickly broke away from their secular origins and have remained distinct to all, save those who do not recognise prayer as being a valid form of life. Christian poetry is not dependent on fixed tradition, but on the looser tradition of poetry in a particular culture. It seeks to renew and innovate that tradition by posing a resemblance between the human world of the poet’s tradition and the revelations of God.

The Christian poet does not need to write hymns, catechise, nor versify saints’ lives to be such a poet. This is still a claim within the Church by latter-day Platonists who pre-specify virtue and send the poets away. The answer to them is the same as the answer to Plato. Poetry is part of the human world, unless you recognise its implicit goodness, it will either become inhumanly selfish, or abstractly unworldly. He needs to believe, but does not need to be saint, except as a spiritual necessity. Many sinners have been great Christian poets. Many great saints wrote worthy, but unoriginal poetry. It is an attempt to re-harness grace to creativity that makes some claim that as St Theresa of Avila, St Therese of Lisieux, or John of the Cross were great saints, they must be great poets. As if being a saint would enable one to grasp algebra better than the wickedest mathematician.

The secular world responds in a variant of feminism that would claim every female saint, or other religious to be a frustrated poet. Yet every word the saints write is usually of great devotional significance. In the end, follow a poet’s advice and in Auden’s words “Do not be a friend of those who read the Bible (or a saints’ writing) for its prose.” The Christian poet seeks to evangelise through the implicit authenticity of her, or his, similitude with the human condition. This does not mean that Voltaire, or Miakovsky, was an implicitly religious poet. Commitment is needed, as secularised poetry, using Christian imagery abounds.

This brings me to a final concern. I have used the word “tradition” very frequently in this lesson. Yet what do I mean by it? Are hymns more faithful to it than poetry? I find the answer to this lies in the answer to another question, the boundary between poetry and prose; more in the next lesson. Here are two Advent poems by modern poets, Sir John Betjeman www.christmas-time.com/cp-advent.html (Those who want more on Betjeman’s Christianity, see Kevin J. Gardner; Christianity and Literature, Vol. 53, 2004) and Patrick Kavanagh http://plagiarist.com/poetry/5624/ html
Both treat the human condition with similitude, yet they are very different. Decide one abstract thing they have in common. Use it as the working title for the project below.

Project Two

1. Begin with the phrase “I am…”

2. Then, add three concrete nouns about which you have strong feelings.

3. In a second sentence, give the nouns an action. In other words link them with a verb. Put the objects somewhere you could script exactly as in a short film.

4. A third complete sentence about two things that you like. Avoid vagueness and abstraction. Describe the concrete objects with two or three adjectives. Do not use “and”. Use only one verb.

5. Three nouns in three sentences with an action that describe what you like to see in other people; end each line with “I thank you for that, or begin “I thank you for…” You can think of an equivalent phrase, but it must be the same in all three cases.

6. A sentence containing a positive thought or feeling. It can tell what you find acceptable in yourself. 6

7. Sentence in which you show something negative in yourself or others, however the sentence must end by showing that out of something bad can come good. Use the word “but” to link the bad and good, or the phrase “Out of… comes…”

8.-9.-10. Each line is a short sentence relating something about which you have strong feelings–likes or dislikes. They do not have to relate to each other or to the previous lines you have written.

11. End with “This is the way it is”; “This must be so” or a similar phrase. 12. Keep each sentence short and end-stopped. Take your abstract title, could you put “Prayer” after it? “Or A Prayer of…” before it?

Email (bl0ndel@bluewin.ch), or post your response. Remember posts could be public unless you specify otherwise. Those who responded to the previous project should get an email as soon as I can send it. Thank you for replying.

(C) Copyright Duncan McGibbon