Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination

Lyle Jeffrey David

Description

The God of the Bible often speaks in poetry. Beginning with an illuminating exploration of eloquence in the divine voice, a highly acclaimed professor of literature opens up the treasury of biblical tradition among English poets both past and present, showing them to be well attuned not only to Scripture's meaning but also to its music. In exploring the work of various poets, David Lyle Jeffrey demonstrates how the poetry of the Bible affords a register of understanding in which the beauty of Holy Scripture deepens meditation on its truth and is indeed a vital part of that truth.

Sujets

• Idioma inglés
• English
• Christianity
• Anglais

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 16 avril 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781493416899
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Cover
Half Title Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
© 2019 by David Lyle Jeffrey
Published by Baker Academic
a division of Baker Publishing Group
PO Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.bakeracademic.com
Ebook edition created 2019
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
ISBN978-1-4934-1689-9
Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are from the King James Version of the Bible.
Scripture quotations labeled NKJV are from the New King James Version®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations labeled NRSV are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright © 1989 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
The poem “Adam” is reprinted from COLLECTED EARLIER POEMS by Anthony Hecht, copyright © 1990 by Anthony E. Hecht. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
The poem “Supernatural Love” is reprinted from SUPERNATURAL LOVE: POEMS 1976–1992 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg. Copyright © 2000 by Gjertrud Schnackenberg.
Contents
Cover i
Half Title Page ii
Title Page iii
Copyright Page iv
Preface vii
Introduction xi
1. Poetry and the Voice of God 1
Part 1: Medieval Poetry and the Bible 15
2. Paraphrase and Theater: Bonaventure’s Retracing the Arts to Theology and Literary Evangelism 21
3. Quotation and Inflection: Dante and Chaucer on the Sermon on the Mount 43
4. Egyptian Gold: Biblical Transformations of Ovid in The Canterbury Tales 67
5. Irony and Misreading: Courtly Love and Marriage according to Henry VIII 85
Part 2: Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination after the Reformation 101
6. Poetry in Preaching, Prayer, and Pastoral Care: John Donne and George Herbert 111
7. Habitual Music: The Influence on English Poets of the King James Bible 131
8. Conclusion and Form for the Personal in Modern Poetry 149
9. The Conversion Poems of Margaret Avison 159
10. Meditation and Gratitude: The Enduringly Beautiful Changes of Richard Wilbur 179
11. Epiphanies of a Father’s Love: Anthony Hecht and Gjertrud Schnackenberg 189
Epilogue: Can Faustus Be Saved? The Fragile Future of Our Common Book 205
Index 219
Back Cover 224
Preface
T his volume of new and selected essays is threaded together to tell a story to which I have committed my scholarly life over the last fifty years—namely, of the magnificent fruitfulness of Holy Scripture in the work of English poets, including dramatic as well as lyric poets from Caedmon to the present. T. S. Eliot famously, and in some considerable measure rightly, said that “the Bible has had a literary effect upon English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been considered as the report of the Word of God” ( Religion and Literature , 1935). There is undeniable truth in this observation; indeed, it has been a working assumption for most who have seriously considered the richness of biblical story, character, and allusion in vernacular European literatures, including myself. Yet it is not the whole truth. The history of literature since the Enlightenment bears a persistent witness to the power of biblical language, idiom, phrase, poetic style, and spiritual presence to move poets to evoke it even when belief has ostensibly been lost. It is this second truth, of the power of Scripture to fire the poetic imagination independently of prevalent religious authority, which completes the design and labor of this volume.
I have sought to be at least a little like the “householder instructed unto the kingdom of heaven” spoken of by Jesus in Matthew’s Gospel, who “bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old” (Matt. 13:52). My principle of selection has accordingly been one of which I hope others than myself may approve; the essays assembled here are (to me and, I gather, others) among the most satisfying of my career. I have linked them in such a way as to outline a story basic to English literary history, especially as it pertains to lyric and dramatic poetry, and also to bear witness to the power of Holy Scripture to elevate the creative mind. Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7 are new; chapter 4 renews an essay I began some decades ago but never till now completed; the other chapters are reworkings, some quite heavily, of earlier essays that have been well received and yet are now in need of both updating and, as I am regularly reminded, easier accessibility. For those of my readers who may wonder how I could seem to overlook in a book of this sort the epic verse of John Milton, my answer is simply that two of my former students, Dennis Danielson and Philip Donnelly, both eminent Miltonists, have written comprehensively and persuasively on Milton’s biblical and theological imagination, and anything I could add here would be superfluous.
I am indebted to several publishers for their permission to incorporate work first essayed in their domains: to Oxford University Press for an extract from “Conclusion and the Form of the Personal in Modern Poetry,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no. 2 (1975); to Franciscan Studies for permission to extract from “St. Francis and Medieval Theatre,” Franciscan Studies 43, no. 21 (1983/1988); to Sage Publishing for permission to draw on “Courtly Love and Christian Marriage in the Court of Henry VIII,” Christianity and Literature 59, no. 3 (2010); “Of Beauty and a Father’s Love: The Recrudescence of Fatherhood in Recent American Literature,” Christianity and Literature 55, no. 2 (2006); and “Communion, Community, and Our Common Book: Or, Can Faustus Be Saved?,” Christianity and Literature 53, no. 2 (2004), a talk given at the Modern Language Association in response to being given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference for Christianity and Literature in 2003 and largely preserved in its oral format; to Brazos Press for allowing me to reprint “The Beatitudes in Dante and Chaucer” from The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries , ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman, Timothy Larsen, and Stephen Spenser (Brazos, 2007); to the American Bible Society for allowing me to revise “Habitual Music: The King James Bible and English Literature,” which first appeared in Translation That Openeth the Window: Reflections on the History and Legacy of the King James Bible , ed. David G. Burke (Society for Biblical Literature, 2009); to ECW Press for permission to revise “Light, Stillness, and the Shaping Word: Conversion in the Poetic of Margaret Avison,” from “Lighting Up the Terrain”: The Poetry of Margaret Avison , ed. David A. Kent (ECW Press, 1987); and, finally, to First Things for allowing me to revise my essay “God’s Patient Stet : Richard Wilbur at 90” (2011).
I have, of course, many other obligations of gratitude than can be represented adequately here. Dominic Manganiello, Graeme Hunter, and Michael O’Brien each offered suggestions on one or more of these essays at some point in the past, and poets Anthony Hecht and Margaret Avison of blessed memory, and with them Richard Wilbur, have each been a source of personal encouragement. My generous Baylor University colleagues Phillip Donnelly and Katie Calloway, and my Chinese colleagues Yang Huilin, Zhang Jing, and Liu Jiong, have offered thoughtful comments and suggestions. I am indebted also to my resourceful graduate assistant Caroline Paddock, as well as to Abigail Higgins, and last but so far from least as east is from west, to my wife, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey, whose sharp eye and not-so-frequent “stet” has led to many an improvement in what follows.
Introduction
T his is a book about poetry in the English language, especially such as exhibits the particular indebtedness of the English poetic voice to an unusual muse or animating spirit—namely, the language and spirit of the Bible. The persistence of biblical overtures, even in the absence of a living faith in many a poet, is something that may be readily observed in English verse, even in late modernity, to a degree unparalleled in other European languages. In fact, while the painting of biblical subjects and painting that includes biblical allusions is much more a European than an English cultural phenomenon, precisely the reverse is true in poetry. Scripture is not only a chief source of subject matter in English for much of the language’s history but, more profoundly, it has served as a perennial touchstone for the poetic imagination itself, lending thus to poetry in English a rich polyphony of harmonic voices and a distinctive spiritual character.
Those readers of poetry in English from its beginnings to the present who have also some familiarity with the Bible will have unavoidably observed its pervasive influence. Even an inexperienced reader will see how commonly biblical narrative serves as inspiration or foil for poets such as John Milton in Paradise Lost , John Dryden in Absolom and Achitophel , T. S. Eliot in “Journey of the Magi,” or Howard Nemerov in “Lot Later,” not to mention countless others. What becomes apparent to a more seasoned reader, however, is that the Bible has been overwhelmingly influential over much more than name and story; pervasive idiom, locution, meter, and parallelism, aside from more direct borrowings of line and phrase, all bear witness to a biblical foundation. Beyond all this, there is a presence in English annals of a conception of poetry itself in which, to borrow a phrase from Walter Benjamin, the poet construes his task as im