On the restoration of poetry: In Church, in life, in Christ

By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | Aug 19, 2022

In the August/September issue of First Things, the Catholic poet Dana Gioia offered a major essay on “Christianity and Poetry”. Gioia makes important points about not only the power of poetic language, but its particularly salutary role in both spiritual memory and worship. He reminds us that poetry is a significant aspect of Scripture itself:

No believer can ignore the curious fact that one-third of the Bible is written in verse. Sacred poetry is not confined to the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Lamentations. The prophetic books are written mostly in verse. The wisdom books—Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes—are all poems, each in a different genre. There are also poetic passages in the five books of Moses and the later histories. Prose passages suddenly break into lyric celebrations or lamentations to mark important events.

While there are no poetic books in the New Testament, Gioia rightly notes that poetry is woven into the fabric of both the Gospels and the Epistles, and that the Book of Revelation is “a prose poem, full of sound and symbol”. Sometimes key events are almost ecstatically recorded in poetic terms, most notably the enduring Magnificat, through which Mary came very close to breaking into song when she visited her cousin Elizabeth.

The essay goes on to consider both how poetry is related to Christianity, and what constitutes “Christian” poetry. There is a delightful survey of the shaping of the religious imagination in English-language poetry, from the Dream of the Rood through Shakespeare and on to the great religious poets of the seventeenth century, including Donne and Milton. The survey continues up through the twentieth century, touching on both the British Isles and America, and remembering poets as diverse as Newman, Hopkins, Chesterton, Eliot and Auden. The presentation closes with a section on the loss of Christianity’s “traditional connection with the arts”, the reasons for which Gioia regards as too complicated to explain in this particular essay. “There are huge cultural, sociological, and economic barriers”, he notes. But he believes there is a reasonable case at least “for restoring the presence of poetry in the Church”.

Platitudinous Language

Gioia is not always quite fair in describing how liturgical poetry came to decline. In one place he refers to the tragedy which occurred “when the Second Vatican Council dropped [the sequences for the major celebrations] from the Catholic missal.” Sequences are poetic hymns or chants which were traditionally used to mark many special feasts. But of course the Second Vatican Council did not abolish sequences, nor did it even call for this to be done in the future. Insofar as it happened, it happened as a result of the prosaic banality of the liturgical reformers who dominated the liturgical “renewal” which came after the Council, and which violated a good many of the Conciliar norms (albeit ultimately with papal and widespread episcopal approval). Most readers will remember, in addition, how plain, and how uprooted from their proper liturgical, historical and even Biblical context, were many of the initial vernacular translations of the Novus Ordo, though much of that has since been corrected. In fact, we have even seen the reappearances of key “sequences” in the “highest” liturgies in the best parishes and dioceses.

Sacred music (if we might stretch a point and call its most common late twentieth-century manifestations by that name) followed a similar anti-Conciliar path. Gregorian chant, despite the Conciliar call for it to retain pride of place, was dropped as if it burned our liturgical tongues, to be rapidly replaced nearly everywhere with the most banal vernacular hymns each budding liturgist could find or compose.

Everyone will remember the joke that quickly arose about the difference between a liturgist and a terrorist—the answer being that you can negotiate with a terrorist. There was for a generation and more a scorched earth policy toward the linguistic and artistic accomplishments of the centuries, which were replaced by a nearly pure linguistic and musical banality. But we must also recognize that, at least in the better dioceses and parishes, both Gregorian chant and other forms of genuinely sacral music have made a significant comeback, even as corrections to the initial translations have reinforced the spiritual focus and the deep connections of the Mass with Sacred Scripture and the life, death, and resurrection of Christ.

Nonetheless, Gioia is correct that Christian poetry can make a comeback, and this for two reasons. First, “it never entirely went away. Although its role in worship and education was curtailed and its music flattened…, there was simply too much of it to vanish.” Second, the change in attitude which he regards as necessary has already gotten slowly underway: a growing “conviction that perfunctory and platitudinous language will not suffice, an awareness that the goal of liturgy, homily, and education is not to condescend but to enliven and elevate.” Gioia emphasizes that we must “recognize the power of language and use it in ways that engage both the sense and the senses of believers.”

Speaking and writing as children of God

I am still frequently appalled at the bouncy and banal “hymns” chosen for children’s choirs (“Yeah, His grace is enough!”), and at times even for adult “folk” choirs, though I confess I haven’t heard for a very long time that “the answer is blowing in the wind”, nor have my ears been recently assaulted with that hoary old Indian war chant, “They’ll know we are Christians by our love”. A large percentage of the snappier hymns so rapidly written and adopted beginning in the late 1960s and 1970s were both rhythmically unsingable, owing to odd patterns of syncopation, and verbally unsingable owing to the appalling mediocrity, emptiness or even falsehood of the lyrics.

More destructive still, perhaps, has been the banalization of Western culture as a whole in an age when constant electronic aural and visual bombardment, most often reduced to the lowest common denominator, has replaced many fine family customs—such as good conversation, singing together, or Mom and Dad reading sonorous poetry to their kids. When I was six or seven, I think, my mother used to read me the poem “Jesse James” by William Rose Benét (the more famous Stephen Vincent was his younger brother). It begins this way:

Jesse James was a two-gun man,
(Roll on, Missouri!)
Strong-arm chief of an outlaw clan.
(From Kansas to Illinois!)
He twirled an old Colt forty-five;
(Roll on, Missouri!)
They never took Jesse James alive.
(Roll, Missouri, roll!)

…and so on for fourteen stanzas. This, of course, is apropos of poetry in general, not Christian poetry. Jesse James was never close to becoming a role model in my family, but the reading of the poem was still a series of privileged and imaginative moments. Today, books have been dumbed down to poorly written puff pieces for the latest immoral trends, promoted by publishers and public libraries alike. At least their language is seldom memorable! Deep and beautiful literature is only rarely taught any longer in school. Parents need to learn who the truly excellent authors are for each age group, and put their books in the hands of their own children. Parents who are actually seen reading at home open up a deeper world to their children. Kids who can actually read are ahead of every game, and if they have actually read wise, faithful, charming and entertaining things, they are ahead in even the most important game of life.

In the Catholic pulpit I suspect things are better than they were a generation ago, at least in the dioceses which have undergone significant genuine renewal. One does not want to elevate form over substance, but faithful priests who prefer truth to fashion and have an ear for effective public speaking can subtly increase the impact of their homilies without making their oratory the center of attention. The same is true of teachers in the classroom. And children really should be exposed to occasional memorable expressions of genuine wisdom by their parents, around the dinner table. Conversation is a family essential before it is anything else, but it is also in many important ways an art. Even those who are less formally educated can, in their own dialect, value rhetorical precision, polish and punch. In fact, scholarship often drives the natural beauty out of language, along with its inherent joy.

I think it really is true that an ear for poetry lies at the very heart of all of these accomplishments, whether musical, liturgical, homiletic, instructional or conversational. It is not that we are all supposed to sound like old books. Nor are we to communicate through private symbols and other indecipherable verbal conceits. Rather, our speech, our song, and our very thoughts can be improved and deepened by a familiarity with (and the cultivation of) effective images, memorable phrasing, and verbal allusions to the unique Christian grasp of reality.

Poetry is intensely concentrated language. As such it can deepen and enrich our engagement with the Faith, and part of that process will be its influence on a growing engagement with each other. Superficiality is the enemy, and in modern culture the enemy is Legion. The best poetry is not the flashiest poetry, but the poetry that, precisely because it is fully human, reaches out and insists on touching our Incarnate God.