Classics, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry & Politics

God And The Poets

All CategoriesClassics, Literature, Philosophy, Poetry & Politics

Course synopsis

Poets have engaged with notions of the spiritual since at
least the Greeks and their epics describing the conduct of the gods.  Our starting point will be British medieval
lyrics dwelling on mystical/aesthetic love poems: the love of God for Man, Man
for God, Mother for Child etc. and how such preoccupations are picked up by
later poets such as Marlowe, Spenser, and Bunyan.  It might be worth an excursion into The King
James Bible and the English (British?) Hymnal at some point too.  

 

We shall move on to consider some of the devotional poets of
the  seventeenth century such as Donne,
Herbert, and Vaughan to share their experiences of and struggles with faith,
adoration, and humility in an age where the shift from a God centred to a man
centred world began to offer new perspectives. This came to spectacular
fruition in Milton’s desire” to justify the ways of God to men” undertaken in
Paradise Lost. 

 

 The Romantics sought
God in nature, in the self and in some cases through the workings of revolution
personal, philosophical and political.  Blake,
Clare, Wordsworth and Shelley spring to mind here.  They were followed by Victorian writers (e.g.
Arnold, Tennyson, Christina Rosetti, Hardy, Hopkins) and their struggles with
faith and doubt in a pious but rapidly changing world of scientific discovery
and large scale industrialisation.

 

Modernists such as Eliot, Frost, Lawrence, and Yeats  radically and variously redefined their
relationship with God as did many other rather later twentieth century poets
post Holocaust/post Hiroshima.  Any
number of case studies suggest themselves ranging from Betjamen and Larkin
through two Welsh Thomases (Dylan and R S) to more contemporary figures such as
Heaney, Adrian Mitchell and Les Murray

 

If some of this sounds rather dull and dry let me reassure
you that the emphasis will be on poetry and language rather than theology –
about which I know very little. Some of the aforementioned poets are merely
suggestions at this stage and as our meetings progress we can throw others into
the mix. 

15th September to start

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About the teacher

Les Berry

For many years before taking retirement I was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the Manchester Metropolitan University, teaching across all of the department's degrees and...

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