Religious Poetry, and Religionist Poetry

by Joseph S. Salemi

When a literary critic touches on matters of religion or religious subjects in poetry, he must walk a very hazardous tightrope. Poetry, by its very nature, can deal with whatever subject the poet finds congenial or suitable; and no critic has the right to declare a subject off-limits or inappropriate. After all, the impulse to poetry is a natural and universal one—anyone from any culture or race or ideology may feel the urge to write, and may write on any topic in whatever style he likes.

His choice of topics might range from politics to personal feelings, from philosophy to sex, from anger to blissful ecstasy, from nature to fantasy, from family relations to ancient history. I mean, really—nothing is off the table. If poetry is a licensed zone of hyper-reality, everything is fair game for the poet’s pen.

But religion is different, in a qualitatively intense way. Any sincere religious belief is embedded in the worldview of the person who holds it, and embedded in a manner that determines not only that person’s behavior, but his attitudes, assumptions, habits, responses, preferences, and many opinions. In short, religion is dominant, in the sense that for a believer it will be the primary criterion for any judgment or decision he makes. For some religious persons, their religious ideology colors every single thing they say or write, every act they perform, and every thought they think. They never have a day off, so to speak.

That doesn’t mean that there can’t be any good religious poetry. Religious belief has been incorporated into poetry since the first bard ever sang. The Sumerian Hymns to Inanna, Hesiod’s Theogony, the Homeric Hymns to various Greek divinities, Egyptian songs to Osiris, Isis, and the divine Pharaoh, the early Latin carmina of the Arval Brethren, the Psalms in the Old Testament—all of these are poems of praise to otherworldly beings, or expressions of belief in and loyalty to them. They were important elements in the cultures that gave birth to them, and the authors of them used all their poetic skills to produce poetically competent and aesthetically appealing verbal artifacts. Even a not especially religious poet like Ovid wrote the Fasti, a detailed presentation of Roman religious belief and customs.

So what is the problem? Nothing at all. Every culture produced religious poetry, just as every culture had its particular gods and myths of creation and inherited stories of divine-human interaction. Some energy in each culture was devoted to writing religious poems, while other energy went into secular poems that dealt with different subjects and concerns. Religious poetry presented no problem as long as religion was considered merely one more possible subject to choose for treatment, no different from politics, sex, satire, history, praise of kings, or the various occupations and vicissitudes of life, such as farming in the Georgics of Vergil, the stars in the Astronomica of Manilius, seduction in the Ars Amatoria of Ovid, or warfare in the Iliad of Homer.

Difficulties arise when a poet is so utterly devoted to his religious ideology that it prevents him from writing on any other subject, or when his ideology inevitably tinges and overshadows whatever secular theme he might be treating. Like the Superstitious Man described in the Character Sketches of Theophrastus, he cannot take a step or a breath without worrying about what divine forces are at work around him, and what is the proper way to follow their will, or palliate their anger.

A poet with this problem has a tendency to write what I call “religionist poetry.” I distinguish this from genuine religious poetry, which is merely the art of poetry used on a religious subject. There are countless excellent religious poems that describe religious events, or discuss a religious idea, or sing the praise of a saint or God, using the same tools, techniques, and conventions that other poets use to write poems on love or combat or nature or emotional conflict. But for a religionist poet, these tools are merely the preliminary groundwork for something else.

A religionist poet has an agenda that goes far beyond the aim of producing a good poem. He doesn’t really care about a good poem. What he wants is to “do good,” in some ethical sense. His aim is to edify, evangelize, and enroll the reader. Let’s talk about what those three words mean. Let’s call them “the three e’s.”

To “edify” means to instruct, uplift, or improve someone by means of your words, as might happen in a Protestant sermon or a Catholic homily. It doesn’t mean to teach someone something, as one might teach a child to use a tool properly. It means to make some kind of moral appeal to the person, to “call him back to goodness,” to “help him see the light.” It means to work on him rhetorically in such a way as to change his mind, or convince him to follow your path, or shame him into repentance, or congratulate him on his piety. It is profoundly manipulative, and non-aesthetic.

To “evangelize” is even more blatant. It means to preach to the reader directly about the truth of your scripture-based beliefs, and to urge their validity upon him. This is the second stage of a religionist poet’s agenda—it aims to set the foundation for bringing the reader into complete alignment with one’s beliefs.

To “enroll” is plain enough. It means to convince a reader that he must come over to the religionist poet’s entire way of thinking, by giving full assent to what is being presented, and entrusting himself to the entire panoply of ideological baggage that the religionist poet carries.

Now let’s be perfectly clear at this point. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with wanting to edify, evangelize, and enroll someone. It goes on every day, all over the world. Many sects try their best to gain new members, either by direct preaching or more subtle propaganda, and there is no law against it, except in more fanatical nations where a particular religious sect has great power, and forbids any proselytizing by other faiths.

But as I said above, religion is different, in a qualitatively intense way. If it is merely one subject among any number of other subjects, and treated as such by the poet, no difficulties arise. But the religionist poet is not primarily concerned with the art of poetry. He is concerned with his religion, and the categorical imperatives of belief and behavior that his religion enjoins. In other words, his art comes second (as a mere instrument), and his agenda to edify, evangelize, and enroll comes first.

There are many wonderful religious poems where the “three e’s” are not present. Take this magnificent poem by Saint Robert Southwell, the Jesuit martyr:

The Burning Babe

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow,
Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow;
And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near,
A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear;
Who, scorchèd with excessive heat such floods of tears did shed
As though his floods should quench his flames with which his tears were fed.
“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry,
Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I!
My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns,
Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns;
The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals,
The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls,
For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good,
So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.”
With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away.
And straight I callèd unto mind that it was Christmas day.

Robert Southwell was a passionately devout Catholic who willingly gave his life for his religious faith. His entire purpose in life was to serve his fellow English Catholics in a land of Protestant heretics and priest-killers. And yet the above poem contains not a shred of the lust to edify and evangelize and enroll! It simply presents a poetic conceit: a vision of a burning infant, a record of the infant’s words, and the speaker’s final couplet where the bare suggestion or hint is given that this infant is the Christ Child. The poem is eight rhyming couplets in perfect heptameter fourteeners, recording what might be a vision or reverie on a wintry night. It has its aesthetic force precisely from its reticence, which does not hit readers with sermonizing or explanations or urgent pleas. It is a religious poem, not a religionist poem.

Consider another well-known poem, The Hound of Heaven, by Francis Thompson. I can’t quote the ode here because it is lengthy, but the poem is available here. When I was an undergraduate at Fordham, this particular piece was beloved by the older Jesuits, who thought it was a perfect expression of God’s infinite love for man, and man’s terrible tendency to shy away from that love in fear and selfishness. The poem is a brilliant confessional account by the speaker of his many useless attempts to flee God, and God’s steady chase after him, until he is caught. It is filled with some of the most moving passages in all of English poetry.

And guess what? There isn’t a single line of evangelizing or preaching or “uplift” in the entire ode! Not a thing that could be printed in a tract! There is only a magnificent flow of unearthly language, so harrowingly beautiful that I am always moved by it. No arguments or pleas or urgent solicitations to conventional piety mar the poem, which is as fictive an artifact as Cellini’s salt-cellar.

There are many other religious poems that I could bring forward as examples of works that are free from the terrible “three e’s.” There are Ernest Dowson’s “Carthusians,” and “Nuns of the Perpetual Adoration,” two of the best descriptive poems of contemplative life in cloistered orders. Or Oscar Wilde’s sonnet “Holy Week at Genoa,” a lovely vignette of the sudden clash of Hellenic beauty with the remembrance of Christ’s passion. Or Lionel Johnson’s “The Church of the Dream,” a solemnly prophetic meditation in alexandrines on the slow decline of traditional faith.

What do these religious poems have in common? They are, first and foremost, poetry. They exist as specimens of the art, not as calls to changed behavior or allegiance to doctrinal specifics. In religionist poetry, the art doesn’t matter. The poet is simply a disguised salesman for a line of goods.

I am not an absolutist. Even religionist poetry can be good on occasion. But what hinders it from ever being as good as truly religious poetry is its fixation on being an instrument of evangelization, and of its insistence on proclaiming didactic messages “in season and out of season,” as St. Paul urges in his letter to Timothy. This policy of exhorting and rebuking and encouraging people to behave and think only in approved ways is the source of religionist poetry’s weakness. The practice of hectoring people and shepherding their intellectual lives might be allowable in missionary work and teaching, but it is certainly a severe handicap when writing poetry. It’s not what people want.

Consider this example from the Hymns and Poetry (1743) of John Wesley, one of the major figures in Methodism. Using poetry as a means to evangelize in blatant ways is endemic to Low-Church Protestantism, which seems to thrive on bad hymns:

Meet and right it is to sing
Glory to our GOD and King,
Meet in every Time and Place,
Right to shew forth all thy Praise.

Sing we now in Duty bound,
Eccho the triumphant Sound,
Publish it thro’ Earth abroad,
Praise the Everlasting GOD.

Praises here to Thee we give
Here our open Thanks receive,
Holy Father, sovereign LORD,
Always, everywhere ador’d.

Wesley did not give this poem a title, but he appended these words on the page that contained it: It is very meet, right, and our bounden Duty, that we should at all Times, and in all Places, give thanks unto Thee, O Lord. Is this not a perfect example of the entire religionist attitude towards art? Unless the art works for God’s purposes, in season and out of season, it is not worth doing at all.

Here is another of Wesley’s poems, from the same book:

Forth in thy Strength, O LORD, I go
_Thy Gospel to proclaim,
Thine only Righteousness to shew,
_And glorify thy Name.

Ordain’d I am and sent by Thee,
_As by the Father Thou:
And lo! Thou always art with me!
_I plead the Promise now.

O give me now to speak thy Word
_In this appointed Hour;
Attend it with thy Spirit, LORD,
_And let it come with Power.

Open the Hearts of all that hear,
_To make their SAVIOUR room,
Now let them find Redemption near,
_Let FAITH by hearing come.

Give them to hear the Word as Thine.
_And (while they thus receive)
Prove it the Saving Power Divine,
_To Sinners that believe.

So notice what we have here—not art, not verbal grace, not the enchantment of linguistic beauty, but mere hymn-book doggerel. God forbid that I should deny its possible effectiveness in converting sinners, or promoting piety, or being of spiritual value to simple persons. But please admit this: IT IS NOT POETRY! It is not the sort of thing that approaches the heights of what we are aiming at when we call ourselves patrons of tradition and classical verse composition. And if you write religionist poetry, no matter how much you try to disguise it, you are really writing under false pretences. As I said in an intense dispute here at the SCP several years ago: “We’re writing poems here, not celebrating a Pontifical High Mass.”

Lest readers think I am being unfair by quoting mere hymns, let me point out that even some of the best poets can fall into religionist verse. Henry Vaughan’s famous poem “The World” is a well-written example of the mode. Vaughan was a Metaphysical poet, and was strongly influenced by the piety of George Herbert.

“The World” is lengthy, so let me give a brief précis of it, with a short section. The poem centers on the conceit of eternity as a ring of light, underneath which the world goes on in total disregard of it. The poem begins with the famous lines “I saw Eternity the other night, / Like a great ring of pure and endless light…” It then describes how most of the denizens of this world—lovers, statesmen, misers, thieves, epicures—live and act in pure ignorance of and unconcern for eternity’s ring. Here is the closing section:

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;
__But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
___Before the light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
__Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
___Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
___More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
___One whisper’d thus:
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide
___But for his bride.”

This is pure religionist poetry. Vaughan had pointedly rejected his earlier secular poems as “idle verse,” and turned his talents to exclusively devotional, piety-laden work. Notice how this section speaks of the separation of those who are in the light, and those who are in darkness, and how the former will soar up to God, while the latter will remain in “this dead and dark abode.” This is open, sermonizing didacticism, and it is followed by the closing quote that proclaims the ring of eternity as a reward for the elect only (those chosen by the Bridegroom). In other words, Vaughan’s poem is not merely an invidious comparison of the sheep and the goats, but also an assertion of the Calvinist notion of predestination. Light and darkness, sinners and saints, the elect and the damned, eternity and the world—the poem is practically a playbook for religionist poetry, using all the tropes of an earnest Evangelical preacher.

And this brings up another problem with religionist poetry. Since it is written by members of various sects, doctrinal conflicts come into play. A Catholic religionist will object if a Protestant poet expresses skepticism about the value of good works for salvation; a Protestant religionist will be offended if a Catholic poet offers undue reverence for the Blessed Virgin, an Evangelical religionist will be angry if either of them isn’t loud enough with scriptural tub-thumping. This is why a collection of religionists at a poetry website will likely bring about one or both of two consequences: fights may break out over specific beliefs, or the entire website will be deserted by pagans, atheists, agnostics, or religiously lukewarm persons. In short, the art of poetry will disappear because issues of ideology and dogmatics will be considered more important than anything else.

I know some persons will object that I am making enemies of those who simply “want to do good,” and give the blessings of faith to their fellow man. Here is my answer: It is not the purpose of poetry to “do good.” It is not its purpose to “save the world.” It is not its purpose to “make people better.” It is not its purpose to “lead souls to heaven.” All of these pious philanthropic aims have nothing to do with poetry, which isn’t a charitable concern run by a church, or a United Nations emergency committee convened to address a problem.

Poetry is simply language used in its best and most expressive manner, without reference to any ethical imperative or divine commandment. It touches on any subject the poet happens to choose, and it has no extra-aesthetic agenda. It is its own raison d’être, unanswerable to any authority other than unprejudiced critical judgment. It cannot be employed as a means to some other end. The problem with religionist poets is that they simply refuse to accept this reality, and insist on using the art for a purpose they consider higher than art itself.

In preparing this essay I visited a great many religious poetry websites (some sectarian, some interdenominational, some just vaguely “Christian”). As is the case with all websites, there was a range of quality in the work posted. Some was good, some middling, some amateurish, some showing promise, some embarrassing. But one thing I noticed was absolutely the same in each place. Every single poem was religionist, and there was no poem on any other subject! There was no poem dealing with violence, or sex, or humor, or excitement, or playful fun, or hard satire, or just tough everyday secular concerns. Almost every poem was rooted in a scriptural text, or a liturgical prayer. The poems were drenched in piety and holiness, and composed in the kind of saccharine “elevated” style that one normally associates with a prayer meeting.

If we are aiming for a serious revival of classical poetry in all its manifold forms, and one that is rooted in the complex traditions of our culture, I don’t see how we can possibly be aiming for something that reeks of pious proselytizing.

Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine TRINACRIA and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.