Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief - Paperback

by Michael D. Hurley (Author)

In this ambitious book, Michael D. Hurley explores how five great writers - William Blake, Alfred Tennyson, Christina Rossetti, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot - engaged their religious faith in poetry, with a view to asking why they chose that literary form in the first place. What did they believe poetry could say or do that other kinds of language or expression could not? And how might poetry itself operate as a unique mode of believing? These deep questions meet at the crossroads of poetics and metaphysics, and the writers considered here offer different answers. But these writers also collectively shed light on the interplay between literature and theology across the long nineteenth century, at a time when the authority and practice of both was being fiercely reimagined.

Author Biography

Michael D. Hurley teaches English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a University Lecturer and a Fellow of St Catharine's College. He is the author of G. K. Chesterton (2012), co-author (with Michael O'Neill) of Poetic Form (2012), editor of the new Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Father Brown Stories, and co-editor (with Marcus Waithe) of Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017).