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This chapter discusses how Tractarianism revived debates over formal worship, assessing the ways in which the Oxford Movement leaders, notably Newman, Keble, and Faber, saw form as a means of containing and channelling religious emotion. It assesses Keble’s widely disseminated poetic theories, particularly as displayed in his lectures as Oxford Professor or Poetry, in this light, and includes a detailed reading in the final section of the chapter of his deployment of form in The Christian Year.

One of the difficulties which an explicitly Christian poem, or artwork, presents for criticism is its appearance of thematic uniformity. Readers of such a poem frequently seem to think that the ideas are transcendent rather than historically particular. The enormous revival of interest in Christian and even Catholic poetry which began in the Modern Period and which flourished with New Criticism did not take any serious account of the work of Christina Rossetti. This chapter asks why is it that not a single critic associated with the New Critical movement ever wrote anything about Christina Rossetti. Fortunately, the ultimate marginality of Rossetti 's particular Christian stance was to become the source of its final strength, the privilege of its historical backwardness.

This chapter examines how women used theological poetry to enter into public space during the 1820’s and 30’s through its consideration of the works of Agnes Bulmer and Felicia Hemans. In particular, the chapter focuses on changing definitions of Christian womanhood in Methodism and how Bulmer negotiated them as a poet, scholar, wife, and faithful Methodist. It then turns to Bulmer’s epic poem, Messiah’s Kingdom, to explore how she develops her epic theology—accessing a tradition of women acting as prophets and priests to forward a unique systematic theology that places sense experience, of both the natural and spiritual worlds, at the center of evangelical hermeneutics. Finally, the chapter turn to Hemans’ religious poetry, and particularly the Songs and Hymns of Life, to witness how Hemans at the end of her life uses poetry to advocate for a public religious role for women. In essence she “takes a text” in the Methodist sense and licenses poetic preaching in a world that was rapidly revolving away from these types of roles for women.

This chapter discusses the passionate connections between Donne's divine and worldly poetry. It shows that while Donne's erotic poems are more indebted to religious metaphor, his nineteen ‘Holy Sonnets’ rely more on erotic imagery. The chapter then analyses and compares Donne's religiously erotic poems with his erotically religious poetry. It determines that Donne's erotic poetry views love as a form of (artful) performance and engages in some form of histrionics of love making, also showing that role-play and theatricality are two main features of Donne's devotional and erotic writings.

This chapter considers the works of Christina Rossetti. Rossetti presents a peculiarly useful subject through which to explore how certain writers move in or out of critical attention. In addition, her religious poetry offers a testing ground in which to work out a methodology of stylistic periodization. Because Christian poems, especially in the Anglican and Anglo–Catholic tradition, preserve a more or less stable ideology between the 16th and the early 20th centuries, their period-specific characteristics can be more readily isolated and studied. Anyone who has studied Christina Rossetti knows the frusatration of working with the hitherto ‘standard’ collection of her poems edited by her brother William Michael Rossetti. Meanwhile, her poetry takes up an ideological position which is far more radical than the middle-class feminist positions current in her epoch. The principal factor which enabled her to overleap those positions was her severe Christianity.

Lyric poetry in the classical languages and various vernaculars is evident in the earliest medieval centuries, from the beginning of medieval literature. But an international style marked by shared forms and themes—European literature in the strong sense—dates from the innovations in Occitan love lyric beginning at the close of the eleventh century. That poetry draws on at least three post-classical traditions. One can be traced back through religious poetry in Latin, Greek, and Syriac, itself based on the Bible and in conflict with Manichaeism. A second is indebted to Semitic poetry of al-Andalus, in today’s Spain. A third draws on the Cathar heresy, which has Near Eastern roots. In turn, Occitan love poetry most crucially influences Sicily, where the sonnet is invented. Tuscan poets adapt the form, which via, Petrarch, defines the main line of European lyric.

This chapter examines the formative relation between church architecture and religious poetry, particularly Tractarian poetry, in the 1830s and 1840s. It considers works from very different theological perspectives, including Isaac Williams' ‘The Cathedral’ and John Ruskin's Seven Lamps of Architecture, and argues that the ‘central space’ for religious feeling represented by church architecture and poetry played a major role in the shaping of belief. The chapter also looks at Coventry Patmore's writings which address the question of ‘the reconciliation of life and law’ in gothic.

The introduction sets out the book’s main themes: a philosophical reading of Paradise Lost, in which the relationships between philosophy and literature, literature and religion, and religion and philosophy are examined. The book's guiding metaphor—an ascent—is explained. The introduction explains why previous routes by which philosophy and literature have been successfully connected before are less suitable for religious poetry. The book does not follow the “compensatory” model, in which literature overcomes limitations that hamper philosophy. Instead, the reading hopes to expose episodes of misalliance between philosophy and literature. Implications for interdisciplinarity are briefly discussed. The tensions between religion and literature in relation to beauty, knowledge, and the imagination are presented. Finally, some methodological clarifications are made.

In 1872 Henry Ward Beecher, the most prominent American preacher of the time, claimed that hymns, particularly those of Isaac Watts, shaped Americans’ theology in a uniquely powerful way. Hymns even apart from music—read aloud, memorized, and contemplated—found a special place in the inner lives of nineteenth-century Americans closely akin to that of Scripture itself. The roots of “religious emotions” in hymnody—especially for those generations of Americans who had learned hymns from childhood—were linked to a range of theological concepts. Crookshank examines how the poetry and music associated with the towering figure of Isaac Watts has been invoked and supported in a variety of religious settings for more than two hundred years.

The book concludes by specifying the ways whereby, although at some points philosophy and religious poetry must part ways, they nevertheless profit by hosting each other. Two vocations can be mutually enriched not only by finding ways to complement each other, but by appreciating that, while overlapping in many ways, their differences are sometimes irreconcilable. Philosophy gains from enabling the poem to embody a rival paradigm of knowledge as well as a competing view of the place of knowledge in a meaningful existence. Religious poetry is deepened when it permits itself to seriously respond to philosophical questions. An argument is offered regarding why warfare (intellectual warfare) can be beneficial, and why, accordingly, a philosophical reading that preserves and even kindles this war, rather than one that hopes to pacify it, can be revealing.

Poems LXXVI–LXXXII in Greville’s sonnet sequence, Caelica, are among the most heavily revised writings in all of the Warwick manuscripts. The poems struggle to reveal in the lexicon of courtly love the workings of positive law and temporal power, implicitly understood in opposition to natural law and grace. In these poems, grace signifies its very opposite, not just a parody of itself but a perversion of itself, which subjects such as the ‘dull spirits’ of poem LXXX experience as temporal power. But Greville also places in the midst of these analytical poems one gem of clarity, poem LXXXII, shining there like a good deed in a bad world, exhorting the reader to ‘make time, while you be/ but steppes to your eternitie’.

The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite (HHAphr) artfully combines a series of contrasts between humanity and divinity with cosmic history in a special kind of religious poetry that is unique in archaic Greek epic as we know it. The Iliad, Odyssey, and Works and Days are concerned mainly with the human condition, the Theogony and most of the Homeric Hymns with the gods and the genesis of the cosmic order. Only HHAphr and the Homeric Hymn to Demeter (HHDem) make divinity and humanity coequal poetic themes, and only HHAphr ends with the goddess’s defeat and a radical diminution of her power, even as her gifts enable Anchises to transcend the limits of mortality through sexual pleasure, fertility, and a royal lineage. Close attention to diction, style, and narrative technique clarifies how artfully the poem celebrates ‘the works of Aphrodite’ by narrating her simultaneous defeat and triumph and those of Anchises.

Is sin something that exists materially? Or is it mere privation, a negative category that nonetheless moves the sinner away from the good? If so, then how does that movement occur, and to what end? If man is, as Fulke Greville often argues in his religious poetry, ‘a creature of vncreated sinne’, then how is it possible for something uncreated to have an operative effect? My argument is that Greville’s work is fully engaged with contemporary philosophical and grammatical debates on these questions. By examining his use of the terms ‘privation’, ‘deprivation’, and ‘unprivation’ in his sonnet cycle Caelica, we can see a sophisticated and intellectually daring response to the problem of ‘vncreated sinne’.