Does it help to be religious?

If you want to be a poet in a declining literary culture, that is.

As it’s both Holy Week and Passover this week, and I have a high temperature today, I thought rather than bash something out in my feverish state I’d send round this piece which I’ve been working on for a while. This is a more “think-y” piece than usual and is uncharacteristically free of any close reading. Tomorrow morning, though, Hilary at The Friday Poem will be publishing a detailed conversation we had about the poem that won the UK National Poetry Competition at the weekend (Patridge Boswell’s ‘The Gathering’), so you might also want to look out for that.

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Why is it that so many of the best contemporary poets in English are (broadly speaking) religious? And in particular, why does this seem (to me) to be more true now than it was thirty years ago when I started reading poetry seriously? If anything you might expect the likelihood that any individual good poet has a religious formation to have declined as religious observance has fallen, albeit to different degrees and from very different starting points, in both the UK and the US.¹

By ‘religious’ I don’t mean Christian — I’m thinking equally of poets like Khaled Hakim² or Amit Majmudar — and I don’t necessarily mean ‘practicing’ either, and certainly not that the best poems are religious ones. But just that there does seem to be quite a strong correlation between a religious formation or framework influential enough to be audible in the poetry, and pronounced aptitude.³

In the US (but not in the UK), there’s a recognised tendency for “formalist” poets to be religious, especially Roman Catholic. This association between an adherence to traditional form and traditional religion (and/or political conservatism), though irritatingly often assumed to be universal in the Anglophone world, isn’t at all — it doesn’t hold in the UK or Ireland, for a start, and never has. But in any case this is not what I mean — I’m not using ‘aptitude’ as a proxy or code-word for ‘formalist’.⁴ A lot of the poets I’m thinking of — from relatively major figures like Gillian Allnutt (UK) or Gérard Bocholier (France) to more recent arrivals, like Steve Ely in the UK or Isabel Chenot in the US⁵ — are not writing formal verse in that strict sense, and in any case almost all of the big-name US religious “formalists” seem overrated to my British ears.

I think this must have something to do with exposure to the quasi-‘canonical’ role of scripture and liturgy (using liturgy here very loosely to mean any texts which are frequently repeated as a part of religious practice), and that it’s actually a kind of side-product of the decline of mainstream literary culture. Until fairly recently, any serious poet in English could draw on a fairly well-established and broadly-agreed pool of English verse running from, say, Shakespeare to Auden — and, crucially, could expect his or her readers to have at least some kind of familiarity with a similar sort of range. I’m not talking here of the conscious imitation of the ‘now I shall respond to Sonnet 14’ or ‘now I shall write a villanelle because I haven’t done one yet’ type, which for most poets most of the time is a valuable stage but only rarely goes beyond apprentice work; and nor do I mean that readers will, usually, consciously recognise specific allusions or even that they’re meant to. If you’ve read some seventeenth-century poetry, you don’t have to recognise a particular echo of, say, Donne or Jonson or Herbert in Thom Gunn to pick up on the common modulation of his verse into a seventeenth-century style, and to have some intuitive sense of the associations it brings in its train.⁶ If you have read Browning and Frost you’ll have a sense of where the style of many of Anthony Hecht’s longer poems is ‘coming from’, even though Hecht’s tone is all is own — indeed, the particular astringency and sometimes even horror of his work is partly a result of the contrast with those models.⁷ Modernist poets as disparate as Eliot and Robert Duncan rely for part of their effect on the surprising juxtaposition and rapid transition between the styles of, say, Whitman and sixteenth-century lyric.

In the 90s, when I started reading contemporary poetry seriously, pretty much all the most prominent, ‘mainstream’ living poets were writing essentially — though of course in very different ways — within this kind of framework and for readers who were also comfortable within it. Established poets like Thom Gunn, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Fleur Adcock, Tony Harrison, Geoffrey Hill, Philip Gross, C.H. Sisson, Elizabeth Jennings, R. S. Thomas and Wendy Cope were doing very different things but they all drew on — and, for a young reader, just as importantly pointed to — multiple elements of the English poetic tradition. (In many cases well beyond the English tradition as well, but that’s not my focus today.) The pointed to bit is crucial: in a living tradition, new poems can show you how to read older poems as much as the other way around. A young reader might learn, without realising it, how to read Campion and the Greek Anthology from a teenage passion for, say, Housman; how to read Herbert and Tennyson from Sisson.

This sense of writing naturally and as a matter of course within a fairly lengthy linguistic-literary tradition that is shared with your readers seems to me to be a basic requirement for a living literature. Plenty of poets in English are still writing in this way, of course — think of a fine collection like Niall Campbell’s The Island in the Sound (Bloodaxe, 2024, strongly recommended) — but I don’t think it’s really controversial to say that the average highly-fêted poetry collection is now much more shallowly rooted in the literary culture than used to be the case, and that high-profile UK poets, in particular, now quite often sound like imitation-US poets, without the roots in the distinctive American tradition to be heard in the best American writers.

Of course you can write competent and enjoyable verse without much literary hinterland. Many published poems are well-written, contain accurate and even original descriptions or observations, are rhetorically successful and technically skilled, without feeling like they have much to do with other poems from more than a couple of decades ago. Verse like this is fine. But poetry of this type doesn’t offer the reader much on a repeat reading, or over time. Style, tone and diction tend to be quite ‘samey’ even where a poet appears to be writing in a variety of forms.⁸ Words don’t have much sense of history, and even the most effective such poems tend to date quickly. It all feels a bit shallow.

Interestingly, this sense of being cut off from a tradition seems to me to be much less true in French, where poets as disparate as Guy Goffette (establishment favourite), Cécile Coulon (highly fashionable), Pierre Chappuis (concise meditations on nature from the Swiss mountains), Valérie Rouzeau (marvellous wit and wordplay about cooking supper or using the microwave) and Souleymane Diamanka (hip-hop poet) nevertheless give somehow the impression that they are still talking ‘to’ each other and also, as it were, ‘from’ the tradition of French verse from Marot to the present. (Diamanka’s most recently collection has a particularly witty series of variations on the alexandrine, for instance.)

It’s true that the prose poem, to give one example, is much longer-established in French than it is in English, so a French poet working in this very fashionable form has, as it were, much deeper soil to work with than his Anglophone equivalent.⁹ But this sense of a shared conversation surely also has something to do with the relative conservatism of French educational culture: French children still learn lots of poems at primary school and still study a fair amount of canonical verse at secondary school. My middle son is as unliterary as it possible to imagine — at 11, he enjoys listening to audiobooks, but he doesn’t really read anything in either French or English bar the odd bande dessinée (comic book). He enjoys rugby, drawing, computer games, shooting people with Nerf guns, making rude jokes and hanging out with his friends. But when, as we drove through Normandy, my husband suggested we visit Honfleur, even he automatically launched into the beginning of ‘Demain, dès l’aube’, to much amusement all round. (He had misheard Honfleur as Harfleur, a town mentioned near the end of Hugo’s terribly sad and lovely poem.)¹⁰

There are undoubtedly pros and cons to the rather unforgiving style of French education, as anyone who’s had to help steel a terrified 8 year old to recite that week’s poem in front of the class will know, but both Goffette and Diamanka — respectively, Parisian establishment darling and hip-hop artist who moved to France from Senegal when he was two — are, it seems to me, enriched by the fact that their very different poems still speak to one another and potentially — even if not very often actually — to the same reader.

This brings me back finally to the point I started with. Scripture and liturgy are, in literary terms, a shared canon. Poets who are, or have been, religious have experience of and access to a set of texts that they have returned to, read, heard, possibly even memorised over many years, and more importantly, these texts are not just some personal anthology of favourites, but are shared with thousands or even millions of others. Where texts are very well known, even a single word or phrase can activate them: think of, say, ‘darkling’ in English poetry¹¹, or ‘in the beginning’ or ‘mustard seed’ (from the Bible) or ‘lighten our darkness’ (from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer), or the way that Khaled Hakim uses the story of Majnun and Layla.

A Mughal illustration of the story of Majnun and Layla. Walters Art Museum.

Poets who had some kind of religious formation have direct experience of this kind of depth of linguistic association, of what it means to hear the same significant texts repeatedly, to have them in your head. Via religious practice, they have at least a glimpse of a richer kind of oral culture than the very diminished orality of the contemporary Anglophone West (diminished, I mean, in comparison to almost every other historical period and indeed to the great majority of the rest of the world — ours is surely one of the most radically un-oral cultures ever).

What’s more, many religious people encounter scripture and liturgy either in an ancient language (as for orthodox Jews, Muslims, some Orthodox Christians and also a few Catholic hold-outs) or in the form of quite literal translations from an ancient language. In this sense, religious practice may also offer at least some sort of encounter with another linguistic world. (I read an interesting piece the other day about how Mormon missionaries teach people to understand the King James Bible, almost as a second language.) The pronounced monolingualism of much Anglophone culture is also extremely unusual, historically and geographically, and it’s hard to imagine that it’s doing its poetry much good.

Of course, there is a strong traditional association, present in all the cultures I know anything about, between religious experience and the composition of poetry. But even setting that aside, I think a poet today who has had, say, an otherwise typical exposure to English literature at school, but who has a religious background, is quite simply at an advantage.

These are difficult things to write about honestly and straightforwardly because to do so is to risk being understood (or accused) of making a political point: that recent cultural changes have been a bad thing (either specifically for literature, or tout court), or that challenges to the canon or to canonicity are inevitably wrong-headed, or that only religious people can write good poetry, or that everyone should be religious. This is not how I feel and it is not at all what I mean.¹² For a start, there are other ways to acquire a similar sort of ‘advantage’, as for instance in the case of poets whose mother tongue is not English, or not only English, and who have grown up exposed as a result to a second literary culture which remains stronger and more oral. It seems to me that poets in this category are, at the moment, the main exception to the ‘religious advantage’ rule, though the two things may of course overlap.

We have a sophisticated visual culture and a very much etiolated oral culture. Music remains culturally important, so a large number of people who might in other periods have described themselves as poets are working with, or at least alongside, music. Literary cultures change all the time, and as one living literary tradition runs down another emerges elsewhere or in a different form. I think it’s pretty obvious that, for all sorts of reasons, contemporary Anglophone poetry — at least of the conventional poetry-magazine, prize-winning kind¹³ — is not a very vibrant or productive literary culture and won’t feature much if at all in any future canon. I don’t find that upsetting but I do find it interesting. Where in the world do we find literary cultures at the opposite stage, just at the point of bursting into new and exciting life?

1. There is much discussion about the moment about a possible religious revival, especially in the very secular UK. Whether or not there’s any truth to this, it is too recent a phenomenon I think to have had any influence upon poets publishing at the moment. And in any case, I’m talking here really about the sort of cultural-religious formation that happens in childhood. Religious observance has also declined in France, but the link between a religious formation and poetic skill seems to me to be, interestingly, much less pronounced here.

2. I wrote about Hakim’s poetry in this post.

3. Of course this is just my opinion. Any proper study of this phenomenon would need some serious data, and I can’t imagine how you’d go about gathering it (what counts as a religious formation? what counts as a good poet? I certainly wouldn’t be happy at all with using ‘has won prizes’, for example, as a proxy for the latter). So this is just something I have noticed, based on reading a lot of poetry. Anyone who has been reading Horace & friends for a year or so would, I think, concede that I have both strong opinions and quite varied tastes.

4. I admit I find even the term ‘formal poetry’ irritating, since merely the use of it seems to me to introduce immediately critical distinctions that might be useful and valid in the US, but are distorting when applied to poetry from elsewhere.

5. Apart from Steve Ely, I have written about all these poets. Gillian Allnutt here and here. Gérard Bocholier here and here. Isabel Chenot here.

6. I’ve written about Gunn several times, most recently here.

7. I’ve written about Hecht’s poetry in this piece.

8. Right back at the beginning of this substack, I wrote a mildly controversial piece about being underwhelmed about that year’s T. S. Eliot prize winner, Jason Allen-Paisant’s Self-Portrait as Othello, which I think is a good example of this phenomenon: the poems in this collection look superficially quite formally varied, but in fact they all sound rather the same.

9. It is still I think much harder to find genuinely good prose poetry in English than in French. But I particularly value Jeremy Noel-Tod’s recommendations for prose poetry in English — he has great taste and a real depth of reference in the form.

10. Hugo wrote ‘Demain, dès l’aube’ in 1847 after visiting the grave of his daughter, Léopoldine (1824-43). It remains commonly set for memorisation at the upper-primary stage in France (aged about 9-11), and, presumably for that reason, an awful lot of French people can give you at least the first line or two. My middle son is in his last year of primary school. This is the same son who, on the evening of the December 2019 general election in the UK, aged 4, spontaneously stood up on a chair in the kitchen and pronounced “Tiger, tiger, burning bright / In the BORIS of the night”. His prophecy was surprisingly accurate because Boris Johnson unexpectedly won a very large large majority later that evening. Blake’s poem was one of his favourites as a small child, and he has always had a great sense of timing and an instinct for mischief.

11. Shakespeare, Keats, Arnold & Hardy, for a start.

12. My own family, for the record, was not religious at all and I was not christened as a baby, a situation which was still the exception for families of my background at the time (though wouldn’t be now, I imagine). I went to church on my own regularly from the age of 8 or 9 primarily in order to listen to the Book of Common Prayer. This behaviour was tolerated, though not encouraged, by my parents, who had plenty of more important things to worry about than harmless eccentricity and didn’t mind as long as I took myself there and back. As such I am an unusual ‘mixed case’, perhaps a bit like a child from a non-religious family who was sent to a religious boarding school at an early age. I have in fact spoken to more than one poet who had exactly that experience.

13. I’m looking at you, UK National Poetry Competition. Perhaps a worse poem has won first prize before, but if so, I have mercifully suppressed the memory. Tune in to The Friday Poem tomorrow if you are interested in hearing what Hilary and I had to say about it.