Renascence

This article examines “Poem of the Eucharistic Bread” (1946) by the underappreciated twentieth-century Argentine Catholic poet Francisco Luis Bernárdez (1900-1978). It contends that “Poem of the Eucharistic Bread” is not only a poem about the Eucharist, but also a kind of allegory of the Eucharist, one whose poetic diction frames the process of poiesis as significantly analogous to the sacramental character of the Eucharist itself. In the process, the article also suggests that Bernárdez’s rare combination of poetic talent and theological sensitivity ought to win him a wider readership among scholars interested in the relationship between literature and theology.

This essay uses process theology, and branch of theology that emphasizes a teleological perspective regarding sin and suffering, to examine the treatment of death and the uncanny in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. The attitude of the mourners of Tim Finnegan from the first chapter of the novel is compared to the attitude of ALP in her closing monologue, with each view corresponding to a different variety of eschatology, futurized (focused on the afterlife) and realized (how knowledge of the end influences lived existence). ALP’s hopeful demeanor illustrates a balance of these two types, and despite Joyce’s denunciation of organized religion, promotes a deeper spiritual existence and self-reflection.

In 1885, Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote two letters to Robert Bridges in which he referred briefly to several sonnets that he had recently written, and that he intended to send. He did not name the poems, and his subsequent failure to send them left the sonnets permanently unidentified and the remarks about them inevitably cryptic. Nevertheless, subsequent critics have readily and almost unanimously agreed that the remarks refer to some of the poems collectively known as the terrible sonnets; in a curiously circular argument, they have interpreted the remarks in the light of their reading of the sonnets and have, at the same time, used the remarks to shed light on the poems. Critical attention has focused particularly, and almost exclusively, on two remarks: in the first letter, the observation that one sonnet was “written in blood,” and in the second, the assertion that four of the sonnets came “like inspirations unbidden and against my will”. In this article, I argue that these remarks have been misinterpreted — in part, because of assumptions made about the putative group of terrible sonnets and in part through a failure to properly contextualize those letters.

G. K. Chesterton and T. S. Eliot both employed the concepts of orthodoxy and heresy to evaluate the work and influence of some of the most prominent writers of their day. One of Chesterton’s best-known books is titled Orthodoxy, (1908) and one of his earliest works of literary criticism was a collection of articles first written for the Daily News and later published under the title Heretics (1905). T.S. Eliot delivered a series of lectures at the University of Virginia in 1933 that were later collected and published as After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy. In these lectures, Eliot, like Chesterton in his newspaper columns, illustrates the “limiting and crippling effect of a separation from tradition and orthodoxy” on writers whom he otherwise admires. Both authors invoke the concepts of orthodoxy to identify these threatened traditions and of heresy and heretic to identify the forces and figures that constitute the principal threats.