{"id":58358,"date":"2023-08-10T01:30:04","date_gmt":"2023-08-10T05:30:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/?p=58358"},"modified":"2023-07-16T22:34:32","modified_gmt":"2023-07-17T02:34:32","slug":"the-purpose-of-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/bibleandculture\/2023\/08\/10\/the-purpose-of-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"The Purpose of Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

A recent article in the NY Times. (https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/07\/16\/opinion\/poetry-christianity-faith.html) by Tish Warren, an Anglican priest, has an interesting dialogue with her former poetry teacher\u2026.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a helpful excerpt\u2026<\/p>\n

Your next book is about the connection between faith and poetry, and you have quoted the poet and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia,\u00a0<\/strong>saying<\/a><\/strong>, \u201cIt is impossible to understand the full glory of Christianity without understanding its poetry.\u201d What does that mean to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

There\u2019s poetry all over Scripture, in Psalms, Song of Songs, Lamentations, Proverbs, Job, Ecclesiastes and the Prophets. And there\u2019s poetry in the liturgy and in the hymns and songs of the church. The Bible beckons us to think about the poetry that exists beyond Scripture itself, which can help us enter into Scripture in a different way. The songwriter Andrew Peterson said: \u201cThere have always been poets underfoot. God just keeps making them.\u201d Why does God keep making poets? In every generation and every culture across the world there are poets. There\u2019s a great poem by W.H. Auden,\u00a0an elegy for Yeats<\/a>, and he says three times that poetry \u201csurvives.\u201d No matter what else, it\u2019s going to keep going. It\u2019s just a part of who we are as human beings, so it behooves us to think about why is it that God made us as people who write poetry?<\/p>\n

So why does God keep making poets? Or, to put it another way, what is this inherent human urge for poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

One reason I think we keep making poetry is because we are ourselves poems. There\u2019s a verse in the Bible (Ephesians 2:10<\/a>) in which we are described as the \u201chandiwork of God.\u201d But it\u2019s the same Greek root that goes into the word \u201cpoetry.\u201d It means \u201ca made thing.\u201d A more literal translation is that we are, as human beings, the\u00a0poems<\/em>\u00a0of God. So we keep making poetry because we are ourselves poems.<\/p>\n

Another way to think about it is that we keep making poetry because it\u2019s part of natural curiosity, exploration and discovery. I trace poetry back to the story in Genesis, when God brings all the creatures of the world before Adam and says, \u201cYou name it.\u201d Poetry is created in the world as one of the very first vocations and tasks of human beings, because poetry very often is an attempt to name the world properly, because to name it is to know it. And if we\u2019re going to know it well, we\u2019ve got to name it well, and if we\u2019re going to name it well, we\u2019ve got to pay very careful attention to this world that God has made. So I also think of poetry as the art of attention. It\u2019s the ability to pay attention to the world and produce for the world the name of something that must be known.<\/p>\n

How has poetry affected your faith or inspired you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I think it\u2019s hard to have faith without wonder. You need to have some sense of awe, mystery and not-knowing-ness to have faith in the possibilities of the world and what God has done. And I find that poetry is the art that produces in me the most wonder.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A recent article in the NY Times. (https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2023\/07\/16\/opinion\/poetry-christianity-faith.html) by Tish Warren, an Anglican priest, has an interesting dialogue with her former poetry teacher\u2026.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a helpful excerpt\u2026 Your next book is about the connection between faith and poetry, and you have quoted the poet and former head of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":58289,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13682,13679],"class_list":["post-58358","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-each-of-us-unique","tag-we-are-gods-poems"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Purpose of Poetry<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A recent article in the NY Times. 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