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Reforming the Religious Sonnet: Poetry, Doubt and the Church in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 June 2016

Kirstie Blair
Kirstie Blair*
Affiliation:
University of Stirling
*
*Division of Literature and Languages, University of Stirling, Stirling, FK9 4LA. E-mail: kirstie.blair@stir.ac.uk.
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Abstract

This essay examines the tradition of ‘doubting’ poetics through an assessment of selected nineteenth- and twentieth-century sonnets. Through considering recent work on Victorian literature and culture, it argues for the importance of the poetics of faith in this period, and assesses the presence of nineteenth-century Christian, and particularly Anglican, forms and concepts in the genre of the sonnet. Analysing later twentieth-century sonnets by Geoffrey Hill and Carol Ann Duffy, it suggests that the sonnet remains vitally linked to the literature of faith and that these sonnets have vital links to their Victorian predecessors.

Keywords

Victorianpoetrypoeticsdoubtsonnet
Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 52: DOUBTING CHRISTIANITY: THE CHURCH AND DOUBT , June 2016 , pp. 413 - 436
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 2016 

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References

1 Arnold, Matthew, ‘Dover Beach’, lines 21–8, in idem, The Complete Poems, ed. Allott, Kenneth, 2nd edn (London, 1979), 242.Google Scholar

2 Brown, Daniel, ‘Victorian Poetry and Science’, in Bristow, Joseph, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry (Cambridge, 2000), 137–58, at 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Blair, Kirstie, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 I include a brief discussion of the Anglo-Catholic sonnet in Form and Faith, ch. 6. For a good discussion of the religious sonnet in this period, see Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-Century Sonnet (London, 2006). Phelan offers a detailed discussion of arguably the most important self-reflexive sonnet of the long nineteenth century, Wordsworth's ‘Nuns fret not at their narrow convent room’.

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6 See Larsen, Timothy, A People of One Book: The Bible and the Victorians (Oxford, 2011)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Slain God: Anthropologists and the Christian Faith (Oxford, 2014).

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13 Butler, Victorian Doubt, 2; Lane, Age of Doubt, 3.

14 Lane, Age of Doubt, 67.

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17 A considerable amount of recent Hopkins criticism has been devoted to reassessments of his prosodic theory and practice and how these relate to his religious beliefs and affiliations: see, for example, Hopkins Quarterly 38/1–2 (Winter-Spring 2011), a special issue edited by Meredith Martin, on ‘Hopkins's Prosody’.

18 Lane, Age of Doubt, 67.

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27 Auden's sonnet sequences, such as ‘The Quest’, do not, however, reference the history and ritual of the Church in the same way as those discussed here. On Auden's religion and his poetics, see Kirsch, Arthur, Auden and Christianity (New Haven, CT, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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30 On Hill as neo-Victorian, see Wheatley, David, ‘“Dispatched Dark Regions Far Afield and Farther”: Contemporary Poetry and Victorianism’, in Bevis, Matthew, ed., The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry (Oxford, 2013), 291–308Google Scholar.

31 Interview with Jessica Campbell, Oxford Student, 26 May 2011, cited in Murphy, Kathryn, ‘Geoffrey Hill and Confession’, in Lyon, John and McDonald, Peter, eds, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Later Work (Oxford, 2012), 127–42, at 135Google Scholar.

32 Cited in Ricks, Christopher, ‘Tenebrae and at-one-ment’, in Robinson, Peter, ed., Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes, 1985), 62–85, at 65Google Scholar.

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34 Hugh Haughton, ‘“How fit a title . . .”: Title and Authority in the Work of Geoffrey Hill', in Robinson, ed., Geoffrey Hill, 129–48, at 129.

35 See Tom Paulin, ‘The Case for Geoffrey Hill', London Review of Books 7 (4 April 1985), 13–14, and subsequent letters by Craig Raine, Martin Dodsworth, John Lucas and Eric Griffiths in response: 2 and 23 May, 6 and 20 June, 18 July, 1 August, 5 September, 3 October, 7 November, 15 December 1985; London Review of Books 8, 6 February 1986. These letters constitute a significant debate about the function of this sonnet sequence, and can be accessed by non-subscribers at: <http://www.lrb.co.uk/v07/n06/tom-paulin/the-case-for-geoffrey-hill>, accessed 21 October 2014. Andrew Michael Roberts includes a good discussion of ‘An Apology’, mentioning the London Review of Books dispute, in Geoffrey Hill (Tavistock, 2004), especially 50–8.

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38 Tennyson, ‘Tithonus’, line 1, in The Poems of Tennyson, 3 vols, ed. Christopher Ricks (London, 1969), 2: 605.

39 Rowan Williams, ‘The Standing of Poetry: Geoffrey Hill's Quartet’, in Lyon and McDonald, eds, Geoffrey Hill, 55–69, at 58.

40 Alison Flood, ‘Carol Ann Duffy is “wrong” about poetry, says Geoffrey Hill', The Guardian, 31 January 2012, online at: <http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jan/31/carol-ann-duffy-oxford-professory-poetry>, accessed 21 October 2014. Hill did also take this occasion to praise as well as critique Duffy's use of language.

41 In an interview from 1991, cited in Deryn Rees-Jones, Carol Ann Duffy, 3rd edn (Tavistock, 2010), 46.

42 Duffy, ‘Prayer’, lines 5–11, in eadem, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, 1994), 127. A complete text of the poem is quoted in William Crawley's blog, Will and Testament, ‘Carol Ann Duffy's “Prayer”’, 2 May 2009, online at: <http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/legacy/ni/2009/05/carol_ann_duffys_prayer.html>, accessed 27 March 2015.

43 Rees-Jones, Carol Ann Duffy, 48; Thomas, Jane, ‘“The chant of magic words repeatedly”: Gender as Linguistic Act in the Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy’, in Michelis, Angelica and Rowland, Antony, eds, The Poetry of Carol Ann Duffy: ‘Choosing Tough Words’ (Manchester, 2003), 121–42, at 140Google Scholar.

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