David Lyle Jeffrey - Scripture and the English Poetic Imagination

T his volume of new and selected essays is threaded together to tell a story to which I have committed my scholarly life over the last fifty yearsnamely, of the magnificent fruitfulness of Holy Scripture in the work of English poets, including dramatic as well as lyric poets from Caedmon to the present. T. S. Eliot famously, and in some considerable measure rightly, said that the Bible has had a literary effect upon English literature not because it has been considered as literature, but because it has been considered as the report of the Word of God ( Religion and Literature , 1935). There is undeniable truth in this observation; indeed, it has been a working assumption for most who have seriously considered the richness of biblical story, character, and allusion in vernacular European literatures, including myself. Yet it is not the whole truth. The history of literature since the Enlightenment bears a persistent witness to the power of biblical language, idiom, phrase, poetic style, and spiritual presence to move poets to evoke it even when belief has ostensibly been lost. It is this second truth, of the power of Scripture to fire the poetic imagination independently of prevalent religious authority, which completes the design and labor of this volume.

I have sought to be at least a little like the householder instructed unto the kingdom of heaven spoken of by Jesus in Matthews Gospel, who bringeth forth out of his treasure things new and old (Matt. 13:52). My principle of selection has accordingly been one of which I hope others than myself may approve; the essays assembled here are (to me and, I gather, others) among the most satisfying of my career. I have linked them in such a way as to outline a story basic to English literary history, especially as it pertains to lyric and dramatic poetry, and also to bear witness to the power of Holy Scripture to elevate the creative mind. Chapters 1, 2, 6, and 7 are new; chapter 4 renews an essay I began some decades ago but never till now completed; the other chapters are reworkings, some quite heavily, of earlier essays that have been well received and yet are now in need of both updating and, as I am regularly reminded, easier accessibility. For those of my readers who may wonder how I could seem to overlook in a book of this sort the epic verse of John Milton, my answer is simply that two of my former students, Dennis Danielson and Philip Donnelly, both eminent Miltonists, have written comprehensively and persuasively on Miltons biblical and theological imagination, and anything I could add here would be superfluous.

I am indebted to several publishers for their permission to incorporate work first essayed in their domains: to Oxford University Press for an extract from Conclusion and the Form of the Personal in Modern Poetry, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 43, no. 2 (1975); to Franciscan Studies for permission to extract from St. Francis and Medieval Theatre, Franciscan Studies 43, no. 21 (1983/1988); to Sage Publishing for permission to draw on Courtly Love and Christian Marriage in the Court of Henry VIII, Christianity and Literature 59, no. 3 (2010); Of Beauty and a Fathers Love: The Recrudescence of Fatherhood in Recent American Literature, Christianity and Literature 55, no. 2 (2006); and Communion, Community, and Our Common Book: Or, Can Faustus Be Saved?, Christianity and Literature 53, no. 2 (2004), a talk given at the Modern Language Association in response to being given the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Conference for Christianity and Literature in 2003 and largely preserved in its oral format; to Brazos Press for allowing me to reprint The Beatitudes in Dante and Chaucer from The Sermon on the Mount through the Centuries , ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman, Timothy Larsen, and Stephen Spenser (Brazos, 2007); to the American Bible Society for allowing me to revise Habitual Music: The King James Bible and English Literature, which first appeared in Translation That Openeth the Window: Reflections on the History and Legacy of the King James Bible , ed. David G. Burke (Society for Biblical Literature, 2009); to ECW Press for permission to revise Light, Stillness, and the Shaping Word: Conversion in the Poetic of Margaret Avison, from Lighting Up the Terrain: The Poetry of Margaret Avison , ed. David A. Kent (ECW Press, 1987); and, finally, to First Things for allowing me to revise my essay Gods Patient Stet : Richard Wilbur at 90 (2011).

I have, of course, many other obligations of gratitude than can be represented adequately here. Dominic Manganiello, Graeme Hunter, and Michael OBrien each offered suggestions on one or more of these essays at some point in the past, and poets Anthony Hecht and Margaret Avison of blessed memory, and with them Richard Wilbur, have each been a source of personal encouragement. My generous Baylor University colleagues Phillip Donnelly and Katie Calloway, and my Chinese colleagues Yang Huilin, Zhang Jing, and Liu Jiong, have offered thoughtful comments and suggestions. I am indebted also to my resourceful graduate assistant Caroline Paddock, as well as to Abigail Higgins, and last but so far from least as east is from west, to my wife, Katherine Bentley Jeffrey, whose sharp eye and not-so-frequent stet has led to many an improvement in what follows.