Breaking the Silence: Poetry and the Kenotic Word (Transatlantic Studies in British and North American Culture)

This book of essays on poetic speech, viewed in a literary-critical, theological and philosophical light, explores the connections and disconnections between vulnerable human words, so often burdened with doubt and pain, and the ultimate kenosis of the divine Word on the Cross. An introductory discussion of language and prayer is followed by reflections linking poetry with religious experience and theology, especially apophatic, and questioning the ability of language to reach out beyond itself. The central section foregrounds the motif of the suffering flesh, while the final section, including essays on seventeenth-century English metaphysical poetry and several of the great poets of the twentieth century, is devoted to the sounds and rhythms which give a poem its own kind of «body». Cover Table of Contents Preface (Małgorzata Grzegorzewska / Jean Ward / Mark Burrows) The Tremulous Word: On Language in Prayer (Tadeusz Sławek) 1. Theology, Poetry and the Word Word into Flesh/ Flesh into Word: The Making of an Incarnational Textuality (Jennifer Reek) The Dogmatic Definition of the Council of Chalcedon (451) of Two Natures in the Person of Jesus Christ as a Criterion of the Incarnational Character of Poetry (Bernard Sawicki OSB) “That true word ... shal be felt withall”. The Incarnation of the Word in Sibilline Oracles as a Theme of Renaissance Poetry and Iconography (Marcin Polkowski) Eugenio Montale, “The Poor Nestorian at a Loss” (Stefano Maria Casella) Celestial Music Unheard: T. S. Eliot, “Marina” and the Via Negativa (Jamie Callison) 2. Words, Suffering and Silence Robert Burns’s “Jarring Thoughts”: Carnivalesque Metaphorisations of Existentialist Spirituality (Mirosława Modrzewska) The Embodied “I”, the Suffering “I” in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Olga Włodarczyk-Elsbach ) World as the Icon of the Word: Sacramental Imagination in R. S. Thomas’s Nature Poems (Katarzyna Dudek) Lacerating Logos. The Divinity of R. S. Thomas’s Mythic Poems – A Reckless Experimenter or a Selfless Saviour? (Przemysław Michalski) Words Against Words. Four Quartets and the Failure of Poetry (Jacek Gutorow) 3. Flesh, World and the Word Feet in Eden?: Some Aspects of Technique in Religious Verse – Edwin Muir, Jon Silkin, and Anne Stevenson (David Malcolm) Incarnation and Embodiment in The Poetry and Theoretical Writings of David Jones (Martin Potter) “One feels its action moving in the blood”: Arrhythmia as the Art of Reality in Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal” (Mary Elisabeth Regina Esser) Word-As-Flesh Made Artefact: Andrew Marvell’s Poetic Moulding Of The Word (Klaudia Łączyńska) Notes on Editors and Contributors Index This collection of essays is devoted to the intersections of poetic speech, literary criticism, theology and philosophy. The emphasis falls on the connection between poetry and Logos, word and flesh in poetry from the seventeenth century to the present day.