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Christianity & Literature, 2013, Vol.62 (2), p.285-288
2013

Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte
Titel
Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination by Malcolm Guite (review)
Ist Teil von
  • Christianity & Literature, 2013, Vol.62 (2), p.285-288
Ort / Verlag
Malibu: Johns Hopkins University Press
Erscheinungsjahr
2013
Link zum Volltext
Quelle
Literature Online (LION)
Beschreibungen/Notizen
  • In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: BOOK REVIEWS 285 Faith, Hope and Poetry: Theology and the Poetic Imagination. ByMalcolm Guite. Farnham, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. ISBN-lO:0754669068. ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-6906-7. Pp. 268. $99.95. Malcolm Guite, the chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge University, and a practicing poet of distinction, has written a penetrating study of English poetry, ranging from the Middle Ages right up to our contemporary, Seamus Heaney. Starting with a lengthy and dense introduction, which has for me the weight of a manifesto, he leads us through eight chapters, each focused on one or more poets and a handful of free-standing poems or extracts from longer poems or plays. The poets introduced are the unknown author of The Dream of the Rood, William Shakespeare, Sir John Davies, John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, John Milton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Hardy, Philip Larkin, Geoffrey Hill, and Seamus Heaney. Each chapter is filled with close readings of selected poems and is placed chronologically in relation to the others. This temporal scheme is not merely one of convenience. Guites arrangement is part and parcel of an argument which is rooted in the perception of cultural shifts and their consequences for both art and faith. In broad terms, we are taken on a journey that begins with the allegorical/ typological playfulness of a pre-modern world in which symbols and events drawn from Christian scripture are allowed to mix and mingle with one another and the present, each interpenetrating and illuminating the other. From thence, we move into the dynamism of Tudor and Stuart England, a world on the cusp of a gigantic shift away from the imagination and toward the "clarity" of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the astounding advances in both thought and science, "reason;' both in its narrowly rational and its empirical forms, not only is distinguished and separated from the imagination, but the latter increasingly is relegated to mere "fancy" (in the Coleridgean sense). Its role as a vehicle for truth is virtually denied and its ongoing function is reduced to the trivial and ephemeral. What was once a source of truth and insight is reduced to the level of entertainment. This trajectory is well-known, of course. Guite, like many others, discerns the culture of scientific rationalism strongly shaping the culture of the following centuries and receiving especially stark expression in early Wittgenstein, the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, who wished to eliminate all ambiguity in language and reduce it to the clarity of description freed of metaphor and symbol. The abstract, mathematical world of, say, Newton infused not just science but those areas of life informed by ritual and faith, poetry and imagination. In the "brave new world" of the Enlightenment and beyond, that which could not be reduced to abstract principles and observation was often placed in the dustbin of superstition and folly. So what is Malcolm Guites argument and how does it fit in with the picture 286 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE broadly sketched? Here is where I will try to make good my claim that his introduction has the force of a manifesto. To do so, perhaps I can reverse T.S.Eliot and find my beginning in my end. In the concluding pages, Guite says, This book has been written as both a vindication and a celebration of the poetic imagination; a defense of its status a truth bearer and an exploration of the kinds of truth it is capable of bearing. In particular I have been concerned to demonstrate the essential power of imagination to bridge the gap between immanence and transcendence, to mediate between unembodied "apprehension" and embodied "comprehension:' I have also been concerned to show that a study ofpoetic imagination turns out to be a form of theology; that in seeking to understand how multiple meanings come to be "bodied forth" in finite poems which "grow to something of great constancy" we discover a new understanding of the prime embodiment of all meaning which is the Incarnation. And this new understanding of incarnation in its turn gives us a new confidence in the ultimate significance of our own acts of poetic...

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