God and the Imagination : On Poets, Poetry, and the Ineffable

by Mariani, Paul

• ISBN13: 9780820324081
• ISBN10: 0820324086
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2002-07-01
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

Poet, critic, biographer, and Catholic intellectual Paul Mariani delivers huge armfuls of experience and knowledge in this wide-ranging collection of twenty-four essays. As a man of faith in a secular world, Mariani brings to light issues surrounding spirituality and poetry through discussions of the Gnostics, Roman history, the Bible, John of the Cross, Rilke, Robert Pack, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, and the poets he most admires--Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, John Berryman, and Robert Lowell.Charged with spiritual and intellectual awe, Mariani fully engages with his subjects, from their lives to their works to their grand impact on Mariani's own life as a poet. His prose flows easily from anecdote to analysis, from Paterson, the setting of Williams's great tribute poem, to Manhattan, where Mariani haunts old neighborhoods and the Brooklyn Bridge, searching for traces of Hart Crane. By infusing scholarly criticism with a personal voice, Mariani allows us to see the relationship between poetry and a sublime presence in the universe.Serious reading for anyone interested in modern and contemporary poetry, God and the Imagination offers elegant and original insights into a wide variety of poetic concerns. But it is most extraordinary for its celebration of the lives of the poets, which allow us, in Mariani's words, "to recover what would otherwise be lost to time and silence."

Author Biography

Paul Mariani is the author of Thirty Days: On Retreat with the Exercises of St. Ignatius and five volumes of poetry, including, most recently, The Great Wheel. Besides several critical studies, he has also published biographies of Robert Lowell, William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and John Berryman. Mariani currently holds a Chair in English at Boston College.

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Acknowledgments	xv
I. WRITING THE SELF
Beginnings	3	(12)
Class	15	(15)
Hopkins as Lifeline	30	(8)
Quid Pro Quo	38	(7)
Eight or Nine Ways of Looking at a River	45	(10)
II. WRITING LIVES
The Brain That Hears the Music	55	(13)
Kinnell's Legacy: On ``The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World''	68	(9)
Lowell on Berryman on Lowell	77	(18)
Writing Lowell	95	(10)
The Hole in the Middle of the Book: Absence and Presence in Biography	105	(17)
Staring into the Abyss: Robert Pack's Later Poems	122	(7)
Hardy's Heartbreak	129	(14)
Hart Crane: ``Clenched Beaks Coughing for the Surge Again''	143	(5)
Skyscraper Soup: Two Views of Twenties New York	148	(15)
Frost among the Poets	163	(16)
Reconfiguring Flame: The Art of Biography	179	(18)
III. GOD AND THE IMAGINATION
Summoning the Dead: Politics and the Sublime in Contemporary English Poetry	197	(17)
The Intensest Rendezvous: On the Poems of John of the Cross	214	(9)
The Ineffability of What Counts	223	(10)
Toward a Sacramental Language	233	(12)
God and the Imagination	245	(13)
``The Unshapeable Shock Night'': Pain, Suffering, and the Redemptive Imagination	258	(11)
Index	269