The language of redemption: the Catholic poets Adam Zagajewski, Marie Ponsot & Lawrence Joseph

Wallace Stevens, one of the great modernist poets of the last century, wrote that "after one has abandoned a belief in God, poetry is the essence which takes its place as life's redemption." Yet, modernism--the period of literary innovation during which T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce wrote--never succeeded in creating a poetry entirely without a belief in God. Ultimately, more than art was needed in the twentieth century's ongoing search for redemption.

In one tradition, poets continued to pursue an alternative to the either/or of God and poetry, searching for a synthesis between theology's "account" of the divine and poetry's own human, yet God-like, "making." Right up to the present, they have sought out a contemporary language to speak about expressions of immanence and transcendence, the quotidian and the ineffable, without ever once using those terms; their subjects--common or arcane--are drawn from a world that is constantly unfolding, believing in the possibility of redemption rather than loss. They are, in a word, Catholic, and while they are not necessarily writing about religion, their poetry is shot through with the elements and activities of a "cosmos"--in its literal sense of "order"--that contains the possibility of a world with and a world without end.

As a tradition this kind of poetry is not new. The ancients--Hesiod, Homer, Virgil--struggled with it on their own cosmic terms. Dante's Divine Comedy is the poetic paradigm in the Christian world. Among poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Gerard Manley Hopkins, David Jones, and Robert Lowell, just to name a few, have tried to make sense of the order of the world that passes and the order that remains. While Catholic poets maintain a likeness in their search for what one contemporary Catholic poet, Czeslaw Milosz, calls "the resistance of tiny kernels of good,...revealed gradually," they are defined too by the different social and political worlds that have shaped them. As a result, Catholic poetry continues to abide beneath the ebb and flood of other trends because of its inherent desire to embrace rather than dispel the tension between order and difference.

There have been two strains of thought recently on what constitutes what I am calling here Catholic poetry, over and above a poet's assertion that, as a matter of faith, he or she is a Catholic. Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy paved the way in the 1950s and 1960s for a critical vocabulary that would merge a theological worldview with an aesthetic vision. O'Connor is best known for her assertion that the Catholic writer is "incarnational," which is to say revealing mysteries "by describing truthfully what he sees from where he is." Poet and literary biographer Paul Mariani insists that, while O'Connor's notion of the "incarnational" and Walker Percy's belief in the "'touch of God' in our literature seem ambiguous, imprecise, and misunderstood..., it is a dimension of language that seems necessary for any fuller sense of the mystery and multidimensionality of human experience." Arguing that this dimension of poetry has been occluded at times but never lost, Mariani identifies not a strictly Catholic position but a "sacramental language" at work in poets such as Dante, Hopkins, John Berryman, and Richard Wilbur. It is "a language that pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical," he writes, "as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.... Evidence of God's immanent presence ought to be capable of breaking in on us each day, the way air and light and sound do, if we only know what to look and listen for." To look and listen are the first tasks of any poet, and these tactile duties require poets using a "sacramental language" to be engaged first as social beings.

The late poet and critic Denise Levertov, an Englishwoman who emigrated to the United States and found inspiration in William Carlos Williams's own gritty "No ideas but in things," spent the last decade of her life writing about and appreciating poetry of spiritual longing, poetry that, "while it does not attempt to ignore or deny the ocean of crisis in which we swim, is itself 'on pilgrimage'...in search of significance underneath and beyond the succession of temporal events." A self-professed city-dweller, which is to say grounded in the concrete, Levertov, as a reader of poetry, found herself drawn to poems that expressed "a universal dimension that speaks to the inner life. Such poems communicate not just the appearance of phenomena but the presence of spirit within those phenomena." Levertov points to the other side of the Catholic, or incarnational, imagination driving the writer and poet: knowing what to look and listen for must admit the presence of a divine, ineffable spirit. For this reason the poet's looking and listening must be done not just on the level of the social but of the contemplative as well. In other words, the poet must know the internal as well as the external landscapes of experience.