Faith in Poetry : Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief
Author(s): Michael D. Hurley
In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers – William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot – engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.
Review(s):
"In five beautifully written and tightly argued case studies, Hurley...offers a truly fresh perspective...teasing out tensions, torsions, and transformations across lines of poetry, and performing the virtuoso close readings that constitute the core of each chapter. For all their intense attention to detail, however, these readings never feel claustral; rather, Hurley's richly textured arguments are well-situated within the scholarship and attentive to an array of primary sources. Nor do his chapters simply lurch from poem to poem: the rhythm of Hurley's prose is driven by constant qualification, self-reversal, and anticipated objection, which enliven the book's pace with energy and verve. Hurley's style also illustrates his faith in his audience — as well as his faith in criticism as such. In opting for the elegance of an essayistic style, Hurley trusts that his reader will follow the turns of his argument closely and carefully, as the individual features of each poet emerge." - Religion & Literature
"Insightful, ingenious, and compelling, the book should be a welcome addition to the library of anyone interested in the intersection of religion and aesthetics ... Hurley discovers, or rediscovers, poems that have been covered up by generalities, whether the generalities of literary history or of various ideologies. Wiping clean the fogged mirror and dusting the lamp, he allows us to see again, or for the first time, the brilliance of poems dimmed by decades of accumulated opinion. In doing so, he returns us to the poets he has chosen -- Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and T. S. Eliot -- with fresh interest in their poems, and this certainly numbers among the highest accomplishments of literary criticism." - The New Criterion
"With chapters on Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins and T. S. Eliot, Hurley’s captivating and arresting study of the theological implications of style, in the authors he reads and also his own writing, stakes out the productive possibilities of writing about Victorian poetry in a way that keeps both religious and literary forms firmly in the forefront of our thinking." - Victorian Literature and Culture
ISBN: 9781474234078