Volume 29, Number 16 · October 21, 1982
Sacred Space
By Frank Kermode
The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse
chosen and edited by Donald Davie
Oxford University Press, 320 pp., $24.95
The Poems of William Cowper
edited by John D. Baird, edited by Charles Ryskamp
Oxford University Press, Volume I: 1748-1782, 597 pp., $74.00
The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper
edited by James King, edited by Charles Ryskamp
Oxford University Press, Volume II: 1782-1786, 652 pp., $98.00
The editor of an anthology of Christian verse has, at the outset, to decide what the book is for. Pious browsing? Testimony to the predominance of Christianity in our culture, whether religious or secular? Evidence that adherence to Christian doctrine is compatible with the production of poetry that still seems good? An anthology of religious poetry would, you might suppose, be quite a different matter. Yet Helen Gardner's Faber Book of Religious Verse contains nothing that is manifestly outside the Christian tradition, unless one defines that tradition very rigorously. She includes Shelley, Hardy, Housman, and Yeats, but no Jewish poetry, to stray no further from the middle of the road than that. Dame Helen professes to distinguish between Christian and religious, but only to let in a few errant masters like those named above.
Review, 4069 words
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