My longsuffering parishioners often hear me quote poetry from the pulpit during homilies. Sometimes I get carried away, I admit, but there’s a reason I slip into the language of poetry. It's a language God speaks. The Bible is full of poetry. So is Holy Mass. In fact, our liturgy is one long poem. As Catholics, we have abstract theological beliefs that are quite necessary, logical, and rational, but those beliefs aren’t merely academic ideas; they’re a lived experience.
A Catholic desires to know about God but also to know God. This is where poetry comes in, which says true things in a fresh way so that we experience those truths anew, with power and meaning. Poetry, in this sense, is extremely practical. It’s why the Psalmist writes in poetry, or the Blessed Virgin Mary breaks out into poetry in her Magnificat. In communicating the way they do, we too are drawn into the experience.
A lot of people are convinced that poems are too hard to understand, but my experience is that poetry is for everyone.
My friend Abram Van Engen, who hosts a poetry podcast called Poetry For All, and graciously teaches poetry in local churches, agrees. In his recently published book Word Made Fresh: An Invitation to Poetry for the Church, he wants to introduce poetry to everyone, particularly to Christians. In his encouraging, simple manner he opens up the wonderful world of poetry to a whole new audience. In doing so, he shows how fresh and compelling the Gospel really is.
He was kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the book, and I think you’ll find his answers worth your attention.
Father Michael: Are you examining poetry specifically in the Scriptures or is the book about all poetry? Are you limiting yourself to religious poetry, or do you see something life-giving in poetry as a wide-ranging art form?
Abram Van Engen: I take Scripture as an opening to the vast world of poetry beyond the Bible. Poetry fills the Bible, of course. It covers a third of the Old Testament and continues into the New. Clearly, God delights in poetry. But why? What does God love about poetry, and what can that teach us? This book is not about biblical poems. Instead, it asks what we can learn about the art of poetry from its prevalence in Scripture.
I aim to explain not just what poetry has to offer, or how it works, but why it might be worth our time. And I do think it worth our time, especially for Christians—those who already engage poetry through their liturgies, hymns, services, and scripture.
What are some ways that poetry has made your own spiritual life more “fresh”?
I could share many examples — too many! But I’ll limit myself to one. At times when I have struggled with church, I think of a poem called “Church Going” by Philip Larkin. Larkin himself was an atheist, an ardent atheist. But he wrote this amazing poem that captures so much of what makes church matter. He admits that a church holds together and calls sacred all the key moments in life: birth, marriage, and death. And he finds himself, an atheist, drawn to the space repeatedly. He acknowledges “unignorable silence” of a cathedral, leading him to his own “awkward reverence.” And he keeps returning:
tending to this cross of ground
Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what since is found
Only in separation – marriage, and birth,
And death, and thoughts of these…The concluding stanza of this extraordinary poem names church in ways I have found enormously helpful: “A serious house on serious earth it is,” he begins. Here is a poem that has refreshed for me, endlessly, the importance of a sacred space set apart for the deepest moments of life. An unignorable, reverent silence gathers in a place that dignifies our lives and takes them seriously. And this is why I would never confine myself to Christian poets, since I have found my own Christian life so often made new and made whole by poets beyond my own beliefs.
I assume, however, based on the pun in the title that you’re also particularly concerned with poetry as giving “flesh” to theology?
Absolutely. I’m particularly insistent about it. I think poetry does theology in a unique way. It is, I would argue, the most embodied of the literary arts, engaging our senses and enfleshing ideas in experience. For now, I would just point readers to a Dappled Things piece I wrote, called “Doing Theology with Poetry,” that talks about that idea in depth.
How can poetry enliven the spiritual life of your average Christian who, maybe, hasn’t read many poems?
Through resonance and remembrance. If we read enough poetry, we will find poems that resonate deeply with our experiences, our theology, our ideas, our lives. And in that resonance, something new will be made. A kind of tune emerges. Those sorts of encounters refresh and deepen our spiritual lives by giving voice and expression, or by reminding us of what we forgot we knew. The more the resonance, the more the remembrance—and the remembering will deepen our spiritual lives over time. A hymn is the easiest example. Hymns are poems. Some resonate more than others. But those we remember and rehearse deepen in us over time, like grooves.
I know more than one person who came to the end of life with only hymns left in their minds. We need the words that give life to the spirit, the resonance that enables us to remember—even on our deathbed. And that is available to anyone.
The world of poetry is vast and various.
What do you say to those who dismiss poetry as too academic or difficult to understand?
It can be! Definitely. But I give to every full-grown adult this wonderful gift: you will never need to take a test about poetry again. That means, you don’t have to read what you do not like. If a poem seems too academic or too difficult, it might be. But you have the great freedom to set it down. Read other poems instead. The world of poetry is vast and various. Find the poems that find you and set aside any that just don’t work.
To that end, let me offer a word of encouragement from the poet W.H. Auden, surely a genius poet himself, who entered his literary profession by discovering “that poetry does not have to be great or even serious to be good.” As moods change, he notes, so do our needs and desires. “Even for readers, when one thinks of the attention that a great poem demands, there is something frivolous about the notion of spending every day with one. Masterpieces should be kept for High Holidays of the Spirit.”
Not every poem will find you. Many poems won’t work for you at all. And those that reach you one day may not find you receptive the next. That’s OK. A person who has just entered poetry, Auden writes, “begins to learn that poetry is more various than he imagined and that he can like and dislike different poems for different reasons.” Just start reading and set the question of quality aside. The only question that matters for you is this: Does this poem move me? Does it meet me? Does it speak to me? When you find one that does, you’ve found the door, the entrance: the whole world of poetry awaits.
Do you view poetry as having a practical use case? Or is it a good itself?
I think of poetry the way I think of friendship. Is friendship practical? Is it a good in itself? In The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis writes, “The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’” That seems to be the response that also generates a real entrance into poetry: a surprising sense of shared curiosities and concerns. Readers are startled to discover their private longings, loves, and thoughts experienced and expressed by another. A central question of friendship, as Lewis explains it, seems like a central question of poetry: “Do you see the same truth?”
While our lives would be much poorer without friendship, friendship is not strictly required for survival. “Friendship is unnecessary,” Lewis writes, “like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create. It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.” So, we don’t exactly need poetry, but for many people, life is much poorer without it. God and the prophets could have spoken otherwise; but they chose, quite often, to speak in verse.
Poetry, I like to say, is the art of attention.
Do you have any favorite poets or poems that have been transformative for you?
So many! The book was so fun to write because it allowed me to talk about a whole bunch of poems I love and why they have been so meaningful to me. Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Herbert have been friends of mine for a long time, but perhaps my favorite poem is “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden. All this I talk about in the book.
Is there anything about the discipline of poetry, i.e., the form, meter, and shape of a poem, that spills over into the discipline of the spiritual life?
This is a great question. Absolutely, yes. I have a friend, a vice president of a major corporation with a packed and stressful life, who picked up poetry at the age of 50 and learned how to slow his life down through its pace and rhythms. He practices it as a spiritual discipline and a deeper way into scripture. Poets will tell you the same. Some have attempted to replace religion with poetry because they find the discipline itself so spiritual. I’m not sure about that myself. But even Christian poets, like Christian Wiman, will talk about the art of poetry as a discipline of the spirit.
Poetry, I like to say, is the art of attention. Anyone who practices the art of attention carefully will find their spiritual lives changed, renewed, deepened, challenged, and enriched.
