Acknowledgements Introduction: Styling Faith 1. William Blake: Destabilized Particulars 2. Alfred Tennyson: Word Music 3. Christina G. Rossetti: Practically Perfect 4. Gerard M. Hopkins: Counter Stress 5. T. S. Eliot: Failing Better Index
Explores the relationship between poetic form and religious belief through new readings of five canonical Western poets: William Blake, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred Tennyson and T.S. Eliot.
Michael D. Hurley teaches English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a University Lecturer and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is the author of G. K. Chesterton (2012), co-author (with Michael O’Neill) of Poetic Form (2012), editor of the new Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Father Brown Stories, and co-editor (with Marcus Waithe) of Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017).
In five beautifully written and tightly argued case studies,
Hurley...offers a truly fresh perspective...teasing out tensions,
torsions, and transformations across lines of poetry, and
performing the virtuoso close readings that constitute the core of
each chapter. For all their intense attention to detail, however,
these readings never feel claustral; rather, Hurley's richly
textured arguments are well-situated within the scholarship and
attentive to an array of primary sources. Nor do his chapters
simply lurch from poem to poem: the rhythm of Hurley's prose is
driven by constant qualification, self-reversal, and anticipated
objection, which enliven the book's pace with energy and verve.
Hurley's style also illustrates his faith in his audience — as well
as his faith in criticism as such. In opting for the elegance of an
essayistic style, Hurley trusts that his reader will follow the
turns of his argument closely and carefully, as the individual
features of each poet emerge.
*Religion & Literature*
Insightful, ingenious, and compelling, the book should be a welcome
addition to the library of anyone interested in the intersection of
religion and aesthetics ... Hurley discovers, or rediscovers, poems
that have been covered up by generalities, whether the generalities
of literary history or of various ideologies. Wiping clean the
fogged mirror and dusting the lamp, he allows us to see again, or
for the first time, the brilliance of poems dimmed by decades of
accumulated opinion. In doing so, he returns us to the poets he has
chosen -- Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti and T. S. Eliot --
with fresh interest in their poems, and this certainly numbers
among the highest accomplishments of literary criticism.
*The New Criterion*
Fascinatingly explores what the act of writing might itself bring
about .... The book’s vital contribution is to examine, explore,
and illuminate what such guidance might mean and how it might come
to occur.
*Literature & Theology*
Among such recent scholarly recoveries concerning the dynamic
interplay between literature and theology, Hurley's Faith in
Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief is a significant
contribution ... An engaging and striking read. It blends rigorous
and careful scholarship with a thoughtful treatment of religious
poets as those who dare to believe in God and poetry.
*The Catholic Herald*
With chapters on Blake, Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins and
T. S. Eliot, Hurley’s captivating and arresting study of the
theological implications of style, in the authors he reads and also
his own writing, stakes out the productive possibilities of writing
about Victorian poetry in a way that keeps both religious and
literary forms firmly in the forefront of our thinking.
*Victorian Literature and Culture*
Faith in Poetry is the result of the author’s long immersion in the
poetry and poetics, criticism, and social and religious history ...
Hurley is able to engage these discourses in vital conversation ...
A laudable contribution to recent reconsiderations of the ways in
which verse stylistics not only were shaped by religion but also
contributed to the reshaping of religion and the religious
imagination in the long nineteenth century.
*Religion and the Arts*
This book offers a highly revisionary reading of English verse
since the Romantics. Much of the greatest poetry of this period, it
argues, has after all retained the paradoxical dual mark of
distinctively poetic speech as both formal and inspired. Its
originality consists not in an experimental undoing of form or
denial of inspiration (in the name of either subjective expression
or objective craft), but in a specifically religious defence of
these things which simultaneously suggests that the defence of
religion requires a renewal of poetic practice. Such a 'faith in
poetry' experiments with prosody and achieves a new musicality, not
for their own sakes, but as the only way to intimate transcendence
and to develop the experience of a belief that is turn by turn both
luminous and difficult.
*Catherine Pickstock, Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics,
University of Cambridge, UK*
Beautifully conceived and beautifully written, this study provides
an essential context for nineteenth-century poetics. The nexus of
poetic form and religious culture complicates the legacy of
Romanticism and exerts real weight on poetry even today. Hurley’s
prose will be both rewarding to scholars and accessible to
students. One could hardly ask for a more lucid and elegant
treatment of these important questions.
*Charles LaPorte, Associate Professor, University of Washington,
USA*
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