Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period

(Hardback)

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This collection of research explores the interaction of religious awareness and literary expression in English poetry in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many different types of poetics may be seen to be at work in the period 1875 to 2005, along with various kinds of religious awareness and poetic expression. Religious experience has a crucial influence on literary language, and the latter is renewed by religious culture. The religious dimension has been a decisive factor of modern English poetic expression of the last hundred years or so.
The religious and mystical dimension of poetry of the period is borne out by the focus on, among other things, grace and purgation, the tension between time and eternity, redemption and the demands of eschatology, immanence and transcendence, and conversion and martyrdom. Chapters also explore how church practice and ritual, architecture and liturgy, play into the poetry of the period. This volume offers a comprehensive discussion of this important but often overlooked aspect of modern English poetry.

Reviews

Mention -Chronicle of Higher Education, July 11, 2008
"Claire Mansurel Murray gives a clear-sighted, historicist analysis of the Catholic element in the Arsthetic movement... As so often, Auden makes up his own rules, and somehow gets away with it... Emily Taylor Merriman respectfully parallels the Pauline vocations of Hopkins and Hill..." James Booth, MLR, 104.3, 2009

Author Bio

Adrian Grafe is Professor of English Literature at Artois University, France. He is the author of monographs on Hopkins (2003) and Emily Dickinson (2009) and has edited and co-edited several books on British poetry. In 2011 he was awarded a Fellowship of the English Association (GB) for his services to the study of English and poetry.