Category: Poetry
Prolegomena to Poetry
A poem is a thought that comes out sounding good, and lingers awhile; But it doesn’t have to rhyme, Though it could What is poetry? A poet will maintain that it is a noble enterprise; a numinous expression of the...
Reading Emily Dickinson with Job
A few months ago, a Mynah hatchling fell out of its nest in one of our carport rafters. When we found it, it was lying awkwardly on the ground, clearly hurt beyond our capacity to heal. Nonetheless, my kids insisted...
Happy Reformation Day, or, How Melanchthon Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Jesus
Obviously, everyone should celebrate Reformation Day. At this point, even the Church of Rome has surreptitiously attempted to take on board many of the Reformation’s emphases, albeit in impure form and without the necessary dogmatic changes—er, development[1]—that would allow her...
On “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” is a poem about the discovery of new terrains of the imagination made possible by the translation of great works into one’s mother tongue.
On Marianne Moore’s “Poetry”
Why do we read poetry? Why should we? April is National Poetry Month, so it makes sense to take advantage of it to introduce a new series on poetry at Mere Orthodoxy. Its objective is simple: to read some poems,...
The Prophet of Unbelief: On Arthur Clough, T. S. Eliot’s Forgotten Predecessor
By Clark Elder Morrow Allow me to quote a brace of familiar lines from T. S. Eliot’s “Choruses from ‘The Rock'”: In the land of lobelias and flannels The rabbit shall burrow and the thorn revisit, The nettle shall flourish...
The Worldly Poetry of the Puritans
I’m pleased to have Stephen Wolfe back with us again today for this piece on Puritan poetry. The common understanding of the Puritans, in both popular and academic circles, is that they were hostile to all art, despisers of human...
Walt Whitman on Neighbors and Strangers
It is good to remember, especially in light of these presidential primaries, that no era is without its share of baffling endorsements. Andrew Carnegie, whose imperious steel mills did more than perhaps anyone to antagonize the neo-transcendentalist folklore of Leaves...
Waking in the Dark Wood
Midway this way of life we’re bound upon, I woke to find myself in a dark wood, Where the right way was wholly lost and gone. Canto 1:1-3, Inferno Now, this is an interesting way to start a story. From...
Italian Sonnet
I AM, the holy smoking fire, Burns bright on Sinai’s awful height; And tremors from His words of might Split wide the earth and shake the pyre Where goat and bull and Self perspire: Vain off’rings for the King of...