Religion: Religion may be defined as a cultural system of designated behaviors and practices, worldviews, texts, sanctified places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements. Poetry: Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

1. Representation of Religious
Mindset in English Poetry

2. Introduction
• Religion: Religion may be defined as a cultural system of
designated behaviors and practices, worldviews, texts, sanctified
places, prophecies, ethics, or organizations, that relates humanity
to supernatural, transcendental, or spiritual elements.
• Poetry: Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities
of language such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre to evoke
meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
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3. Relation between Religion and Literature (Poetry)
• 1. Common Origen: Religion and literature spring from the same fundamental
sources. Religion is the relation which man bears to ultimate being. It is
concerned with the substance which lies behind phenomena, and also with the
duty which man owes to this being, universal and eternal. It is concerned, too,
with the questions what, whence, whither. Literature, in and its final analysis,
represents the same fundamental relationship: it seeks to explain, to justify, to
reconcile, to interpret, and even to comfort and to console. The Homeric poems
are pervaded with the religious atmosphere of wonder, of obedience to the
eternal, and of the recognition of the interest of the gods in human affairs. A
significant place is held by religion in Greek tragedy. A Divine Providence, the
eternity, universality, and immutability of law, the inevitableness of penalty, and
the assurance of reward represent great forces in the three chief Greek
tragedians. Less impressively, yet with significance, the poems of Vergil are
bathed in the air of religious mystery and submission.
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4. Relation between Religion and Literature (Poetry)
• 2. Similarity in Methods: Religion and literature, moreover, adopt methods not
dissimilar. They stand for the value of the imagination; they represent the
artistic, rather than the scientific, methods of interpreting life and phenomena.
If theology, which is the science of religion, lends itself to definition and to
rational processes largely, religion be longs to the realm of the sentiments and
sensibilities-the heart, the conscience, and the will. Literature, too, likewise
declines to enter the realm of the formal definition; it is the product of the
imagination, and to the imagination it makes its primary appeal, especially in
poetry and, to some extent, in noble prose composition.
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5. Relation between Religion and Literature (Poetry)
• 3. Literature's Indebtedness to Religion: Religion gives to literature, moreover,
vast and rich materials. Its sacred books themselves constitute great literatures
and also furnish materials for great literature. The translation of the Bible into
Gothic by Ulphilas not only preserved the Bible, but also helped to create and to
perpetuate literature. Luther's translation of the Bible and the King James'
Version are not only themselves great literatures, but also have helped to form
great literatures in modern life. German and English speech, as well as letters,
have been made more pure, more intellectual, and more inspiring by these
great translations. It may be also added that the sermons of Robert South and
of Isaac Barrow (qq.v.) are themselves worthy pieces of literature and might be
compared with Burke's Orations. It is also to be remembered that the
institutions of religion, as the monasteries and cathedral chapterhouses, were,
for a thousand years, the custodians of the most precious treasures of
literature. The medieval period was dark and damaging to humanity's highest
interests. In times of war not only are laws silent, but also literature.
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6. Relation between Religion and Literature (Poetry)
• To Summarize In these illustrations of the relation of religion and literature, no
reference has been made to either Shakespeare or Milton. The reason is that in
the older and greater poet, almost no mention is made of religion. That
Shakespeare was, to a certain degree, impressed by the fundamental truths
which constitute religion, there can be no doubt, but also it is clear that his
great inspiration he drew from human, and not from divine, relationships. At
the opposite extreme stands John Milton, who was far more a theologian than a
religious poet. If Shakespeare represents the inspiration arising from human
relationships, John Milton represents inspiration drawn from those dogmatic
formulas which represent the skeleton, but not the life, of the Christian system.
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7. Religious Mindset in English Poetry
• 1. Christina Rossetti, ‘Good Friday’. This poem was published in Christina
Rossetti’s 1866 collection The Prince’s Progress and Other Poems. The poem is
about Rossetti’s struggle to feel close to Christ and the teachings of Christianity,
and to weep for the sacrifice he made. Like Tennyson’s In Memoriam above, the
poem reflects many Victorians’ difficulties in reconciling Christianity with the
new worldview influenced by recent philosophy and scientific discoveries.
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8. Religious Mindset in English Poetry
• 2. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, In Memoriam. ‘There lives more faith in honest
doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds’. These lines from this long 1850
elegy for Tennyson’s friend – perhaps his finest achievement – strike to the core
of the greatness of Tennyson’s poem, which, as T. S. Eliot said, was a great
religious poem not because of the quality of its faith, but because of the quality
of its doubt. By the end of this long cycle of moving poems, Tennyson has
conquered his doubts and his faith in God has been restored.
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9. Religious Mindset in English Poetry
• 3. John Donne, ‘A Hymn to God the Father’. We could easily have chosen one of
Donne’s celebrated Holy Sonnets here, but his ‘Hymn to God the Father’ offers
something nicely representative of Donne’s style in his best religious verse.
Donne is not aiming to sing God’s praises uncritically: rather, he wishes to ask
God about sin and forgiveness, among other things. The to-and-fro of the
poem’s rhyme schemes, where its stanzas are rhymed ababab, reinforces this
idea of question-and-answer. The poem is a sort of confessional, containing
Donne’s trademark directness and honesty, and sees him seeking forgiveness
from God for his sins, while also confessing that he will continue to sin (he
cannot help it) and that he fears death – another sin to add to the list. Donne
then seeks reassurance from God that he will be forgiven and will reach Heaven.
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10. Religious Mindset in English Poetry
• 4. T. S. Eliot, Ash-Wednesday. The first long poem Eliot composed after his
conversion to Anglo-Catholicism in 1927, the six-part sequence Ash-
Wednesday is about Eliot’s struggle to cleanse and purify himself so that he
might be renewed and find deeper spiritual fulfilment. Using Dantean and
Biblical tropes of stairwells, gardens, and bones being picked apart by leopards,
the poem is at times frustratingly abstract (there is lots of wordplay around ‘the
Word’, i.e. the Word of God) and at other times, marvellously vivid. Ash-
Wednesday is the great modernist religious poem in English.
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