Poetry and the Incarnation

Perhaps this is overkill on the poetry, but I think that Stephen Burt’s recent article in the Boston Review is interesting given the recent discussion of poetry here at First Thoughts. For Burt, the days of “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic, creators of overlapping, colorful fragments” are numbered. The “new thing” in poetry, he writes, will not so much be in narrative but in a renewed preoccupation with objects: “The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things. It is equally at home (as he was) in portraits and still lifes, in epigram and quoted speech; and it is at home (as he was not) in articulating sometimes harsh judgments, and in casting backward looks. The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world.”

I’m not so sure about this. I think the poet Henry Gould is right when he says with respect to Burt that “the framework seems to be, again, a focus on the pendulum of style.” And while I am not sure that Gould is right to associate this preoccupation with style with the puritan poet Edward Taylor and the Transcendentalism of Emerson and Thoreau, he goes on to write: “The thing I keep coming back to is the historical aspect of Christianity . . . the absolute local “thingness” of the Incarnation . . . & how the Eastern Orthodox concept of “divinization” somehow echoes, yet corrects & resolves the Faustian egoism of Western Renaissance-Romantic consciousness (precisely because that divinization is dependent on the unique history—the abject-glorious historical actuality—of Incarnation).”

This made me think of the recent poetry of Scott Cairns whose contemplation of the material world in his poems is a form of meditating on the expression of God’s character in creation, however muted by sin.