Poetry and religion have been linked since the first written texts of humanity, even before the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. Exploring the relationship between poetry and religion within the realm of poetry in English, this volume begins in medieval times and ends with a collection of poems published in 2010, with strong emphasis given to the metaphysical poets of the seventeenth century. Nineteen essays cover the work of poets from various periods and continents, ranging from Julian of Norwich and the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing to Thomas Traherne, George Herbert, John Donne, Alexander Pope, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, Robert Graves, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, R.S. Thomas, Grace Nichols, Jean Breeze, Elizabeth Jennings, James Dickey, and Geoffrey Hill.
This book will be of special interest to lovers and scholars of poetry. Close reading of texts, combined with original research and varying critical frameworks, provide a stimulus to read or re-read the poems discussed. The texts in this volume represent the papers given at an international symposium held at the Institut Catholique de Paris in 2011.