Bible and poetry

Fisch yet again: After reviewing the influence of the Old Testament, especially the Psalms, on prose writing in the seventeenth century, he adds: “it is worth bearing in mind that this is not only a matter of the seventeenth century. It is found earlier in the antiphonal plain-song of the Middle Ages, and later, in the writings of William Blake and Walt Whitman, the freedom of whose loose-limbed parallelistic verse has an obvious, and acknowledged Biblical background. In all such examples, the influence of the Bible has been directed to greater freedom, to the breaking down of formal boundaries, to the integration of thought and feeling, to the subjection of aesthetic to moral impulses, and to the promotion of ideas held to be greater ultimately than the writer or his work.”