The critic Walter Benjamin used to speak of “constellations” of ideas. By this, he intended ideas that accumulate together and stand in meaningful relationship to one another, but do not constitute a systematic unity. A certain such constellation has rotated in my sky of thought for some time now and I would like to note its parts as a way of entering into the arguments of four recent books that explore poetry and the divine.

Poetry is the oldest and most universal of arts and, like all the fine arts, it is defined primarily by its formal medium. Yet there is an intrinsic dimension to the poetic that orients it, however vaguely, toward the transcendent, the divine: toward God himself.

That poetry as a form touches on or enters into mysteries greater than itself is one of those facts almost universally acknowledged. The history of literary criticism, from the ancients onward, has largely consisted of various ways of accounting for the nature of this contact rather than disputing the contact itself.

The practice of poetry in our time is lively and yet under duress in three ways. First, the mainstream of contemporary poetic practice neglects not only its essential form but also its orientation to the transcendent. Much contemporary poetry is formless, and attempts to be “secular,” purely horizontal in orientation rather than vertical. But this, as Rémi Brague has written in another context, is “impossible.”

Second, poetry has long since been demoted from a major to a minor art in contemporary society. Poetry once was the central formal medium for story, philosophy, theology, and the various kinds of lyric and song. Because of the multiplication of the arts in the modern age, poetry, for most people, has come to mean the lyric exclusively. Despite the continuing composition of narrative poems, for instance, poetry plays a negligible role in the storytelling of our age.

Third, poetry is under duress insofar as ours is a post-literate age. Fewer people read books and those who do read fewer of them. As Ted Gioia has written, a few decades ago the great cultural question was between art and entertainment, or high and mass culture. The natural concern was that entertainment would swallow up the cultural terrain traditionally occupied by the fine arts. In our day, however, the situation is bleaker. Art and entertainment alike are being swallowed by distraction, the continuous, unfocused habit of scrolling through social media. We are no longer even consumers so much as we are ghostly eyes passing over the surface of things.

The arts and humanities are intrinsically related to human life in two ways. As the term “humanities” indicates, these fields help people become more fully human. As the use of the term “culture” in the previous point may suggest, the fine arts are formative of the culture to which we naturally social beings belong. We may make individual contributions to culture, but culture is not a possession. Culture rather possesses us. It is the imaginative field in which we dwell. For these and other reasons, it is not surprising that a fine-art medium such as poetry should, however mysteriously, speak “beyond” itself.

If the arts and humanities are intertwined and are humanizing, then every person is in some sense qualified to speak authoritatively about works of art. And yet there is a distinctive kind of intelligence that comes from inhabiting an art from the inside, and this can only come from the practice of an art. We all understand that the trained concert violinist will be able to speak about Beethoven’s string quartets better than the rest of us. Not all of us play music; nearly all of us speak, but to speak of poetry requires not only a familiarity with language but a grasp of prosody, rhetoric, and plot structure, among other formal elements of the medium. We should presume that practicing poets will have more to say about their art than others, however universal the significance may be of a particular work of art.

These and other things I found myself pondering as I turned to a series of books, all published during the last few years, on the question of poetry and reality. All of the books were by practicing poets and I was specifically concerned to hear how other poets talk about the art.

John Poch’s God’s Poems: The Beauty of Poetry and the Christian Imagination directly addresses itself to a post-literate audience. Poch mentions in passing that he had originally conceived of the book as Poems for Pastors before deciding on the actual title, and this confession is instructive. Poch’s book consists of sixteen studies of individual poems, including the distinctly poetic passages from scripture of Genesis 1 and Psalm 23. Poch evidently presumes that Christian pastors are good people, open to the beauty of literature but poorly instructed in the subject and intimidated by it. His redress of poetry is to explore each poem in a familiar, anecdotal manner, conversational and homespun. 

The approach may be compared to the college professor attempting to seduce a room of freshmen into engaging with a great poem. Indeed, in his study of Christian Wiman’s short lyric, “Dust Devil,” he describes his getting enveloped by an actual dust devil one Texas afternoon, while engaged in a discussion with a group of students; this becomes Poch’s means of finding a way into interpretation of the poem. So also is he sedulous to put the reader at ease, telling us that there are “many definitions of poetry” because “poetry is indefinable,” and further suggesting there are no final or right interpretations of a poem: just the kind of thing to make the bashful a little more brave. I think Poch errs here, however. Far better to say – and he does elsewhere in the volume – that “a multiplicity of meanings” can be “suspended in a beautiful balance” within any one poem. This suggests polysemy: depths of meaning beyond the literal, but ones which can be ordered into a hierarchy from the literal to the spiritual. Simply to tell apprentice readers that poetry’s meaning is indeterminate or relative is more likely to move them to indifference than to help them engage with the kind of knowing that poetry makes possible.

Poch’s choices truly are great and run from the Biblical corpus mentioned to contemporary poets, including the accomplished A. E. Stallings and Charles Martin. In between, Poch discusses Richard Wilbur and Philip Larkin, two of the greatest poets of the twentieth century, along with a couple of poems from earlier centuries, by Emily Dickinson and George Herbert. The finest discussion is of what both Poch and I think is one of the greatest poems of the last century, W.H. Auden’s half-meter ballad, “As I Walked Out One Evening.” I have read the poem dozens of times and yet Poch opened up the early stanzas for me in a new way that reveals the influence of Scripture on Auden’s language even in the years before his celebrated return to the Christian faith.

On the whole, although I find this to be a helpful approach to criticism for the contemporary undergraduate classroom, I was left wondering whether Poch’s candid and homely approach to the poems could compel a reader encountering them on the page. Is the proper response to our post-literate age a cheerful but condescending accompaniment? Will the pastors begin to quote some of these lines in their sermons? I hesitate to guess, but I am grateful to Poch for the patient invitation.

Daniel Tobin’s On Serious Earth: Poetry and Transcendence is a more ambitious work than Poch’s and must have as its intended audience his fellow poets rather than the lay reader. This second claim is easily discerned because of the manner in which Tobin couples two distinct questions as if they were only one. The first question is that indicated by the subtitle – the “unavoidable relevance of metaphysical questions to the art of poetry,” and the ways in which poems embody or communicate that which transcends them. Following Czeslaw Milosz, Tobin recognizes that poetry can speak of a “horizontal” but also the “vertical” dimension of experience. With Milosz, he fears that contemporary practitioners have flattened out the art. Tobin frequently speaks of the use of analogy as a kind of “bridge” language that can make the vertical dimension, the theological and metaphysical realms as it were, manifest in a poem. 

Tobin links this in a way that seems capricious and unclear to a second question of concern chiefly to poets and teachers of English. In an age such as ours that seems not simply post-literate but post-Christian, an age that has flattened the celestial hierarchy into the horizontal island of the secular, can we judge poems as greater and lesser than one another? He writes:

It is precisely the loss of the vertical as a sustainable support structure (not to mention a supplier of form, content, and the basic terms of self-understanding) that undermines our reliance on canon-making’s faith in evaluative measurement as the guiding light of tradition, and our faith in history alone as the contrary litmus. The first depends on an aesthetic elite unsupportable except by the assertion of cultural power, the second on a principle of inclusion almost entirely distinguishable from aesthetic achievement.

He asks, Can there be a Hall of Fame, a canon, for poetry? Tobin shows us that we can certainly lament the “lack of a vital center” in contemporary literary culture. He shows us how superficial, indeed vapid, contemporary poetry becomes when it lacks a vertical dimension. What he strives in vain to do is to propose an idea of “tradition” that will allow us to make evaluative judgments about poems, as if we believed in God and the classical cosmic order, even as we also acknowledge the postmodernists’ claims regarding the vicissitudes of history and their formidable influence on our judgment.

Tobin comes ill-equipped to prosecute his argument. As the awkwardly worded passage quoted above suggests, he struggles to figure out how to explore, or even articulate, these two questions that he sees as integral to one another. His references indicate that he read some of David Bentley Hart’s books in preparing his own, but somebody should have warned him away. As his mentioning the word “tradition” may suggest to many readers, the authority to whom Tobin might most helpfully have turned is the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre.

MacIntyre could help Tobin’s argument in two ways. First, Tobin clearly longs for a restoration of the “vertical” in our understanding of the world and our evaluation of literature, but he can only conceive of that restoration as “an assertion of cultural power.” Postmodern critics tell us that all evaluative judgments are merely ideological assertions of power, and that there is nothing that stands outside such machinations of power, however unconscious they may be. Tobin seems to accept the premise right from the beginning and confesses that the poetry we judge as qualitatively superior will really be just those kinds of poems we happen to like. This is what MacIntyre calls the fallacy of “emotivism.” Even as Tobin accepts emotivism he wants to escape it; he wants there to be something that stands outside, something that will ground our judgment in truth rather than force. Against the “nominalism” (his term) of the postmodernists, Tobin asserts that “the poet must be a realist, however unacknowledged.”

The book declares the necessity of ideas as having a reality that stands outside of power and yet Tobin concedes with the postmodernists that any such realism may be a “guarantor of meaning” but at the risk of succumbing to “mental and social fascism.” His alternative is to introduce the ideas of analogy and “tradition” as a way of proposing the reality of linguistic meaning and the vertical dimension necessary for evaluative judgments – but to do so in a soft way that will not make people feel as if they were fascists.

MacIntyre might have observed that Tobin’s formulation of reality as either an arbitrary, entirely historical, game of power or as a stable hierarchy guaranteed by the divine power are both nominalist alternatives. They both rely on power to justify judgment: the postmoderns call that power ideology; the alternative is the capricious God of Scotus or Descartes. In brief, Tobin’s way of defining his questions is beholden to those formulations typical of modern liberalism, insofar as liberalism can only envision the settling of any question by the assertion of some recognized power (the social contract, the state, or democratic procedure). Reason is epiphenomenal to the question of who decides. MacIntyre, in After Virtue and elsewhere, showed this premise and that of “emotivism” to be fallacies (and historical products of the emergence of bourgeois liberalism) by way of Aristotle’s accounts of ethics and politics.

MacIntyre would affirm Tobin’s appeal to tradition but on different grounds than those Tobin offers. As MacIntyre argues in his account of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, we can see plainly and without reliance on any metaphysical a priori claim that all things aim at some end, and that end is the good of the particular thing. We would be incapable of saying anything about the world if this were not the case. An intellectual tradition is simply the ongoing conversation that asks about the nature of that end, what it consists of, and how it may be attained. If we inquire into poetry, we have simply to ask what poetry is for and what it consists of when it is achieving that end. We say that a fine art is “fine” because it aims at beauty rather than something else. Poetic beauty consists in measured speech, memorably expressed, on matters of some significance human, natural, or divine. It offers, to modify poet and critic Yvor Winters’s venerable definition, an account of experience wherein the total form of the expression is included in that account.

The literary and evaluative chaos that Tobin laments has occurred not because there is an agreed upon understanding of the purpose of poetry and yet a wide-ranging dispute over how it is to be achieved. To the contrary, many people who go under the name of “poet” are actually pursuing different ends. They are literally doing something else, whether it is critiquing capitalism, expressing their “identities,” or trying to get a job teaching creative writing.

A poetic tradition, as MacIntyre understands it, would be just that communal contest of inquiry where those who practice the art try to grasp what poetry is for and what makes it good at achieving that end. In an age like ours, where there is little serious discussion among the would-be practitioners, satisfactory answers to such questions will be harder to come by. Happily, one can draw on the long history of that tradition to gain at least some clarity. And we can do so without first establishing a transcendent vertical dimension as an authority to justify our poetic practice, even though that practice may itself lead us to become perceptive of an order that transcends it.

If the first part of Tobin’s book wrestles unsuccessfully with several contemporary poets’ destructive or perverting practices, the second and final part is much more compelling. There, he begins with the egoism of modernist writer Gertrude Stein and shows us a number of things in a convincing and often witty manner. Stein may have been interested in words but she was not interested in sentences; she may have had much to say about language but what language actually said was to her a matter of indifference. In the long term, this led to the claim, “Poetry = wallpaper.”

Tobin catalogues the wallpaper with aplomb. We can practically see it peeling. He shows that Stein pursued her art not as a good in itself but for the sake of her self-anointed reputation as a genius. Her bulky and incoherent works (most of them anyway) were intended to be admired rather than read. He shows the other aims of later writers in Stein’s tradition. Paul Hoover and Charles Bernstein are exemplary here. In the “dissociative and elliptical poetry” of the “postmodern” writers, we find “surfaces turning over again and again in the shallows to nothing more than surface.” Tobin is right there, but he knows it is not the whole story. What we really find is a great number of writers who have simply “received” a handful of postmodern ideas about ideology and power-shaping language, thought, and culture. They then proceed to manufacture poems that simply restate that founding assumption: “the empty performance of an idea programmed into the poem as it were rather than discovered.” Tobin is not the first person to note the way these postmodern works, intended though they are to stand outside and critique the industrialized and economized nature of modern society, merely reproduce its structures, in this case the thoughtless mechanical reproduction of the assembly line. The alternative Tobin longs for is a poetic culture open to discovery, where poetic form opens us to a world beyond ourselves.

Poet, Dante translator, and critic Andrew Frisardi shows us where we might find such a tradition in poetry. In Ancient Salt, Frisardi’s explicit topic is to explore the ways in which poets respond to the long-established “disenchantment” of the modern world. He does that but in an unusual and valuable way: he draws our attention to a line of poets who followed W.B. Yeats in responding to the sterile and mechanical modern age by returning to the esoteric religious romanticism of William Blake. In Edwin Muir, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Kathleen Raine, Peter Russell, and others, we find a tradition of poets who continue to celebrate nature as a place of religious revelation. 

Their religious convictions may be orthodox Christian or a more gauzy and vague “perennial” wisdom tradition, but each of them understands poetry as primarily a mode of spiritual discovery. They respond to the modern age by showing us what does not belong to it. They return nature to us as a place of vision, contemplation, and consolation. The dominant figure in Frisardi’s book is Raine, whose criticism and poems alike celebrate Blake’s influence and speak of the poetic as a way of seeing into the life of things. Most of the poets Frisardi mentions are better known in Europe than in America, and in that sense the book makes a lovely introduction to a whole literary tradition, specifically the continuing romantic religious tradition that often, though not always, couples pastoral epiphany with rhyme and meter, as in the great Scottish poet, Muir, whose work, convinced me, deserves far wider recognition.

Frisardi in one way answers the most important question Tobin raises. Tobin sees in the flattened secular landscape that poetry has become shallow and dull. Frisardi gives us a line of poets who have simply bypassed that impoverishment and continue to live in contact with at least one part of the tradition. Robert Cording’s Finding the World’s Fullness returns us to the more abstract inquiry of Tobin. Tobin’s claim that poets are de facto realists, committed to the intrinsic connection of language to ideas and of ideas to reality itself, finds further support in Cording’s essays. Cording laments that, in “the scientific worldview,” the world seems to have “no metaphysical dimension at all.” 

This is mistaken, replies Cording. Words “mediate,” and while he is not too careful to tell us what they mediate, we soon enough get the idea: “I believe that words point to and depend on a reality apart from the acts of verbal reference.” When we speak or write a word, therefore, we are not simply creating an internally coherent, closed system of signs; we are in fact going out of ourselves into the world. We are not creating but discovering: “We live in a world that we did not create. This world of objects should force us out of ourselves, out of our subjectivity, since description, the task of the poet, demands attention, demands attending to the world of objects.”

Tobin and Cording both make frequent reference to Simone Weil and Milosz, two writers who understood poetic practice as primarily a self-forgetful attentiveness to being. In this sense, poetry is analogous to prayer. The language of poetry emerges from that attention rather than from the independent subjectivity of the poet. Poetry is itself a contemplation of, but also a communion, with the world – however mediated, partial, or imperfect. Cording writes, “Words point to being that is intrinsically meaningful … rather than to a meaningless world on which meaning must be imposed.” The poetic act, whether of the making of the poem or the reading of it, suffices as a solution to the problem of power and judgment that Tobin raises: words themselves point beyond themselves; poetry bears interior to itself a vertical dimension, and merely to speak is to discover and participate in an order created not by us but by God.

For Cording, the great authorities are Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost, and Elizabeth Bishop, and the reason quickly becomes clear. Stevens’ work entertains the possibility that poetic language really does suffer self-enclosure in the imagination, but finally affirms its dependence on a reality beyond itself. Frost and Bishop both had a sense of the presence of the divine in nature and saw nature as a place of communion. They were, however, wary of Christianity, and their poems present a skeptical, dialectical persona that is at once open to the deliverances of nature but also reticent about what, if anything, this might entail. In Frost’s “The Most of It” and Bishop’s “The Moose,” nature makes its presence known but not fully; for the doubtful secular modern, they provide hints and guesses rather than overwhelming revelations.

But poetry is not confined to this vague religious romanticism for Cording. In the middle chapters of his book he draws on the work of the Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye to give us a form of theological liberalism that roots religious belief in the “kerygmatic” nature of Scripture. Scripture does not give us a literal history, at least not primarily, but rather proclaims a belief to us and forces us to make a decision of faith. Poetry and prayer alike are uses of language that are also kerygmatic: what is most essential to them is what they profess to another. Poetry, for Cording, is above all an act of praise.

The richness of all four of these books derives from their authors’ persuasion that poetry is a way of knowing, and that to read good poems is at once to know the world better and also to enter into a world more profound. All the books were less concerned with poetic form than I had expected, given that poetry is first and foremost just that: a form, a medium, a way of saying. Surely that dimension of poetry is the basis for anything it might mediate or reveal. All of them, to various degrees, seemed largely to be attempts to recover the poetic theories of German Romanticism, rather than to look back further in the tradition to the classical accounts of poetry that, in my view, better explain the later claims of the Romantics than did the Romantics themselves. On the other hand, all four show a delight in and reverence for the poetic word; the authors speak as practitioners who have taken stewardship over a tradition that, in our day, is endangered and misunderstood, but still alive.