“Christianity and Poetry” by Dana Gioia

Does poetry matter to your faith? 

Most Christians would likely be puzzled at the question even being asked. 

 

Poet Dana Gioia says it should matter. A lot.

 

In the essay “Christianity and Poetry,” first published 10 years ago, Gioia goes a lot further than saying it should matter. “It is an essential, inextricable, and necessary aspect of religious faith and practice.” It doesn’t matter that most Christians would find that statement absurd, he says, because it’s true. 

 

And then he considers the evidence. How did David pray to God? In poetry called psalms. How did Ruth respond to Naomi’s plea to go back home? In Poetry. The books of Proverbs, Job, and Ecclesiastes are all poetry. So are the Song of Solomon and Lamentations (and the Psalms, of course). While he doesn’t specifically mention it, what is chapter one of Genesis but an oral poem of creation; God speaks the physical world into existence.

 

The gospels and epistles of the New Testament bear the imprint of poetry. The book of Revelation is a prose poem, he says. The Beatitudes are shaped by prophetic verse. Mary’s announcement of the Incarnation in Luke is a poem. Some scholars believe the Aramaic of the Lord’s Prayer is a poem. “When Jesus preached,” Gioia says, “he told stories, spoke poems, and offered proverbs.

 

Dana Gioia

Both Protestants, via modern translations of the Bible, and Catholics, via Vatican II, ground poetry out of Scriptures. The music and the mystery were deemphasized in favor of the strictly rational. And in the process, we forget, or deny, a key aspect of God.

 

Yes, it’s a startling essay, and it goes on for 32 pages. But the man makes a solid argument. To ignore the poetical nature of the Bible is to miss fully understanding it.

 

I came to poetry late. Yes, I was exposed to the poetry we all were in middle and high school, with a strong infusion of British poetry in college. But it wasn’t until I began writing speeches as a central part of my career that I began to take poetry seriously, as something that mattered.

 

And what I began to notice, because I was a church-attending Christian who read and studied on his own as well, was that the Bible was one of the most poetic books I’d ever encountered. It’s almost as if poetry is the language of God.

 

Gioia has published six poetry collections, several works about poetry, and a number of translations, including the recent The Madness of Hercules. He is a former poet laureate of California and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. He’s written four opera libretti and collaborated on many musical compositions. His awards include the American Book Award, the Poet’s Prize, Notre Dame’s Laetare Medal, the Aiken Taylor Award in Modern Poetry, and the Walt Whitman Champion of Liberty Prize, among others. 

 

Related: 

 

Dana Gioia and Meet Me at the Lighthouse: Poems.

 

Rediscovering Seneca: Dana Gioia Translates The Madness of Hercules.

 

Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful: Poems.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

A paper manifesto – Elizabeth Stice at Current Magazine.

 

Editing: Scratch That, Try This Instead – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review. 

 

10° – artwork by Sonja Benskin Mesher. 

 

Churches at the City Boundaries: St. Andrew’s, Holborn – A London Inheritance.

 

The Great Beast – artwork by Jack Baumgartner at The School of the Transfer of Energy.