Introduction to Special Issue “English Poetry and Christianity”

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Introduction to Special Issue “English Poetry and Christianity”

Journal Title: Religions - Year 2017, Vol 8, Issue 9

Abstract

The hallowed scholarly area known as “Religion and Literature” has been seeking to expand itself, clarify itself, and even justify itself over the last decade or two. One sign of this mixture of unease and adventure is an invitation that I received from a distinguished publisher a few years ago. The proposal was for me to edit a companion to “Religion and Literature”; it would consist of twelve or thirteen essays, and would cover all the world religions and literature in all relevant languages. Beneath the sheer impossibility of editing such a volume—no one person, or even an editorial team, could possibly command the languages, literatures, and religious traditions—I could see what prompted the publisher to make his request: how good it would be to see, at a glance, as it were, the many ways in which religions have interacted with literatures, and vice versa; and how fascinating it would be to be lifted from one’s own little world to take in a vast panorama of human experience of the sacred. The volume that he proposed marked a genuine gap. Yet it was not the only gap around. For there could also be a similar, more manageable, companion to Christianity and literature in the American South, another one to Judaism and the novel in America, yet another on Buddhism and Modern Anglophone poetry, and so on. The borders of “Religion and Literature” can be tested in various ways. When I was approached to edit a special number of Religions, I thought of one way. It was very simple in concept, even if the process of bringing it to fruition has uncovered resistances of all sorts. The idea was for a spectrum of contributors, ranging from established scholars to emerging scholars, from people whose main intellectual focus is religion to people whose central interest is literature, each to write an essay on Christianity and poetry in English—with one clause that could not be modified. Those poems that usually appear under that rubric would not be allowed as subjects of discussion. So there could be no essays on poets whose work has become a staple in the field: George Herbert, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Geoffrey Hill, along with a handful of others. One would have to ponder other poets, people usually bypassed or overlooked, and see if the frame of “Christianity and poetry in English” would add something new and important to how we read them or, equally, how we think of “Religion and Literature”.

Authors and Affiliations

Kevin Hart

Keywords

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EP ID EP25754
DOI https://doi.org/10.3390/rel8090161
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