Nine Poets for the Soul

Okay: not that I think most visitors to terra incognita are here because they've been dying to find out who my favorite poets of all time are, but the research I did before starting this blog told me that regular posting matters, and when at a loss, lists are always handy one-offs.

So, in keeping with terra incognita's interest in the connection between words and spirituality, I offer here the shortlist of my top nine favorite poets (I was going to make it the traditional ten: William Blake, Philip Larkin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti might all have contended for that tenth spot. But to be honest, none of them have hit me the way the following nine have, and if I were to have added one more to this list, it would only have been to make it reach a totally arbitrary quota. Who said you always have to have ten "top things" anyways?)

9. Leonard Cohen. for Annie, If it be Your will

8. W. B. Yeats Sailing to Byzantium, Falling of the Leaves, Hosting of the Sidhe.


7. Walt Whitman. Song of Joys

6. D. H. Lawrence. Glorie de Dijon, Shadows, They Say the Sea is Loveless

5. John Keats Hyperion, Lamia.

4. C. S. Lewis. Dying in Battle, Modern Poetry, After Prayers Lie Cold

3. Dylan Thomas, The Force that through the green fuse drives the flower, Light breaks where no sun shines

2. John Donne, La Corona, Resurrection imperfect, Divine Meditation 14

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, I wake and feel the fell of dark, As kingfishers catch fire dragonflies draw flame, Gods Grandeur

In his spiritual autobiography, C. S. Lewis talks about the role that poetry played in his conversion. He says that as he approached the point of conversion, he discovered a "ludicrous contradiction between [his atheist/secular] theory of life and [his] actual experiences as a reader." Namely: "those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory [his] sympathy ought to have been ... all seemed a little thin. ... The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books"-- while the authors he felt he could feed on most deeply, and did-- George MacDonald, G. K. Chesterton, John Donne, Spenser, Milton, Herbert-- all "by a strange coincidence" shared the same unfortunate "kink": their Christian faith.

As he puts it: Christians were wrong-- but the rest were all bores.

At the time, he assumed these authors were good "in spite of" their faith; but as he reached the threshold of his own Aldersgate moment, he began to believe they were good "because of it." Only 3 of the poets on my list are explicitly Christian (Lewis himself, Donne and Hopkins), and many of the others are decidedly not (Thomas, Yeats, Cohen), but I think I get what he means about the best of Christian poetry expressing something of "the roughness and density of life" that secular verse can't get at. The operative word here, of course, is "best." There are times when perhaps Christian lit hasn't always been at its best, but then there have been times I've read a Divine Meditation of John Donne, and felt I had to hold myself perfectly still afterwards for fear the slightest movement might shatter the reverent word-spell he'd woven; and there are times I've read a G. M. Hopkins sonnet and felt like a tender fist had just crushed around my heart. And that too, I think, is a gift of God.