IN T R O D U CTIO N: RELIGIO U S P O E TRY IN A SECULA R AGE 7
tive to superhuman beings.” In Smith’s definition, “superhuman beings are beings who can do things ordinary mortals cannot do.”14 It’s commonplace nowadays for people (especially in the humanities) who feel squeamish about using the word “religion” to trade it for the word “spirituality.” Spiritual implies personal beliefs where religious signifies institutional, doctrinal adherence. Throughout this study, I am referring to religion and not to spirituality. I don’t think substituting spirituality for religion is a fair trade. Where spirituality is as evanescent as one’s lifestyle, religion signifies tradition. Tradition comes from the Latin word traditio, from traditus, which is the past participle of tradere, which means “to deliver,” specifically in the sense of handing something down. In this specific sense, religion and poetry are two of culture’s richest traditions. For my argument, poetry is religious in two potential senses (often together). It’s religious when it draws its material or its outlook from a religious tradition—in the case of the poets in Thick and Dazzling Darkness, that religious tradition is Christianity. Frank Samperi’s, Geoffrey Hill’s, and Fanny Howe’s work represent this kind of religious poetry. It’s also religious when it performs one or more of the functions or exhibits one or more of the phenomena of religion, even when the poet is not himself or herself expressly religious. In the twentieth century, Paul Celan’s work serves as a good example of this second kind of religious poetry: The mystery and revelation of religious ritual seem to be submerged in the mysterious and revelatory properties of the language in his poems. Celan’s work powerfully involves itself with religious material, to be sure, especially the hermeneutical, mystical, and thematic properties of Judaism, but also other religious strains as well.15 Nevertheless, it’s the feeling readers get of a religious meaning made and unmade that draws them to Celan’s work and accounts for what has made him an unusually strong influence in contemporary American poetry. Consider these opening lines to a sequence of poems in Celan’s Fadensonnen (Threadsuns): “Out of the angelic material . . . ”; “The freely blowing light-crop . . . ”; “Dress the wordcaves with panther skins . . . ”; “The highworld—lost, the insanity-trip, the day-trip . . . ”; “The muttering . . . ”; “And no kind of peace . . . ”; “Nearby, in the aortal archway . . . ”16 The language here suggests even as it invents a mysterious reality the poem is merely beginning to glimpse. For instance, the poem “Out of the angelic material . . .” beginning in German, “Aus Engelsmaterie, am Tag / der Beseelung, phallisch / vereint in Einen /—Er, der Belebend-Gerechte, schlief dich mir zu, / Schwester—”,