Elizabeth Bishop and the Poetry of Meditation
Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 1
Abstract
Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry has won the admiration of a number of Christian poets and scholars. This essay argues that one reason for this is Bishop’s subtle engagement with the work of the poet-divines Gerard Manley Hopkins and, especially, George Herbert; through their influence, she enters into the guiding western poetic tradition of the meditative lyric, which is rooted in the Platonic and Christian accounts of the human person as an image of the Triune God in virtue of the mind as a trinity of memory, understanding, and will. Bishop practiced poetry as a moral act open to a divinity it cannot account for or even name, but traces of whose significance run through the world her poems depict. By considering her work, and her poem “The Weed” in particular, in the context of Herbert, the historical studies of Louis L. Martz, and the literary theory of Yvor Winters, we see that Bishop the unbeliever cannot properly be understood as a “secular” poet, but as one who recognizes the meditative lyric as a way of arriving at understanding of a truth that transcends us.
Authors and Affiliations
James Matthew Wilson
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP25653
- DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8010010
- Views 312
- Downloads 6
Whither Shall We Go? The Past and Present of Black Churches and the Public Sphere
In this paper, I analyze the contemporary role of the Black Church in the public sphere. Some argue that despite the historical role of the Black Church in addressing racial inequality, it should not be involved in the...
New Light on a Lost Cause: Atticus G. Haygood’s Universalizing Spirituality
The American tragedy of slavery and the Civil War provides the backdrop for the exemplary spirituality of Atticus Haygood (1839–1896). The son of a Georgia slaveholder, Haygood served as a chaplain in the Confederate a...
Spiritual/Religious Coping of Women with Breast Cancer
This research aimed to evaluate the level of Spiritual/Religious Coping (SRC) of women with breast cancer. This is a quantitative, descriptive, cross-sectional study. A total of 94 mastectomized women who participated...
Instrumental Values as Predictors of Religious Experience in the Lives of Students of Pedagogy and of Philosophy
This article seeks to demonstrate the existence of a relationship between instrumental values and religious experience—in this instance, the experiences of God’s presence and of God’s absence in the lives of Polish stu...
Complicated Grief in the Aftermath of Homicide: Spiritual Crisis and Distress in an African American Sample
Both grieving the loss of a loved one and using spirituality or religion as an aid in doing so are common behaviors in the wake of death. This longitudinal examination of 46 African American homicide survivors follows...