Poetry, Belief and Devotion

Abstract

At breakfast on Friday, 11 June 1784, Dr Johnson informed Boswell that he did ‘not approve of figurative expressions in addressing the Supreme Being’.¹ Beginning with Johnson’s complaint in the Life of Waller, that religious poetry is actually an impertinence, this chapter will consider four states of the relationship between Christian belief and poetry. The second state will be represented by poems of Yeats and Kipling, neither of whom have claimed to be Christian believers in any orthodox sense. Each, however, drew deeply upon Christian association, and found in the traditions of Christianity a tremendous resource for their poetry. The third state concerns three ostensibly Christian writers, the poets George Herbert, W. H. Auden and Edwin Muir, whose poetry reflects their sense of religious commitment and whose vision of religious truth inspires their poetry. Finally, I shall consider that often under-estimated form of poetry which John Wesley described as ‘the handmaid of Piety’, the congregational hymn.