BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In 2002, we aired a profile of the young, bestselling poet Mattie Stepanek and his mother Jeni. They both suffered from a rare form of muscular dystrophy. The messages of hope and peace in Mattie’s writings inspired millions of people around the world. Mattie died in 2004, but Jeni is working to keep his memory alive. She talked with Kim Lawton about how her faith gives her the strength to move forward.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: It’s standing room only at the Border’s Bookstore in Bethesda, Maryland, where Jeni Stepanek is talking about her new book called Messenger. The book is about her son Mattie, the New York Times bestselling inspirational poet who died five years ago at the age of 13. Mattie had a rare form of muscular dystrophy, the same disease that afflicts Jeni. This is the store where Mattie had launched his books, too, and the fact that he’s not here tonight highlights the loss that’s still raw.

JENI STEPANEK: Since he died, I’ve hit some very, very low points. I have had mornings where I’m not quite sure what the sane reason is to bother getting out of bed. I always find one, and if I can’t find one, what I’ve learned is to allow other people to give me a sane reason to get out of bed.

LAWTON: One of Jeni’s biggest reasons for getting out of bed every day is her quest to keep Mattie’s legacy alive. In his short life Mattie wrote six books of poetry and a collection of essays that he collaborated on with Jimmy Carter. He became a friend to the rich and famous and touched millions of people around the world with his message of hope and peace.

MATTIE STEPANEK: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now that can help us live.

LAWTON: Mattie told us in an interview seven years ago that he believed God had a plan for his life.

MATTIE STEPANEK: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

LAWTON: Jeni says from the time he was just a little boy, Mattie told her God was putting messages in his heart.

JENI STEPANEK: And I began to get concerned, actually, and ask him questions like, “Are you hearing voices? Is God’s voice a man’s voice or a woman’s voice?” And he looked at me like I had lost my mind, and he said, “Mommy, God’s voice is not like this. It’s a message in my heart.”

LAWTON: Mattie believed God wanted him to give voice to those messages, and he did that through his poems, which he called his “heartsongs.” Jeni says there were several basic themes.

JENI STEPANEK: Hope is real, peace is possible, and life is worthy. The best I can understand it is that it really is the universal truth. It’s what Jesus Christ taught us, it’s what Gandhi teaches us, it’s what Martin Luther King teaches us, it’s what any good speaker, any peacemaker teaches us: In giving we shall receive, in doing good, good happens.

LAWTON: Since Mattie died, Jeni has gotten thousands of letters and emails from people who say he continues to inspire them. There’s even a grassroots movement of people who want the Roman Catholic Church to open an official investigation into whether Mattie should be recognized as a saint.

JENI STEPANEK: I have had people who have contacted me to say they believe Mattie has interceded in their lives. They believe that Mattie has healed their child, or touched their spirit, or turned them back to God, or prevented them from suicide.

LAWTON: As the mom of a kid who loved practical jokes and didn’t always make his bed, she finds it all humbling and, a bit overwhelming.

JENI STEPANEK: I feel the responsibility to share with people the truth of my son’s life. What I don’t want people doing is thinking, oh Mattie, you know, and putting him up on a pedestal: he’s a little guru, he was perfect, he never got angry, he never got sad, he only spoke bits of wisdom. I mean, he wasn’t. That’s not who Mattie was.

LAWTON: Jeni chairs a foundation named for Mattie that tries to make his message as accessible as possible. There are school curriculum projects based on Mattie’s writings, and parks like this one in Rockville, Maryland, that has a life-sized statue of Mattie and his beloved service dog, Micah, who is now Jeni’s. Jeni herself has also become an inspiration to many. Mattie was her fourth child to die of the disease that she didn’t even know she was carrying.

JENI STEPANEK: When I was having these children, I did not know I was going to give birth to children with this condition. When I was having children I was apparently healthy, active, running two to five miles a day, coaching and playing sports, working on my first doctoral degree.

LAWTON: She was diagnosed when Mattie was nearly two, after her oldest two children had already died and her third child was also dying from the disease. She and her husband divorced, so her focus became being a single mom.

JENI STEPANEK: So even though you grieve the loss of your child, when there’s still another living child, not that the grief isn’t there, but you have to focus on celebrating life with that child, with the one that’s still alive. When Mattie died, that’s when the grief became so overwhelming, because where do you put your mommy role?

LAWTON: Jeni says her Catholic faith helped her cope, and she says despite some times of questioning God, her faith has grown dramatically.

JENI STEPANEK: I’m very good at, through prayer, giving God a to-do list, all right? Dear God, this is where I need you, and this is how you can meet my needs, and I give God the little to-do list, and I think I began to realize towards the end of Mattie’s life prayer is not just giving God your wishes. It’s asking to bring God into whatever the moments are in my day.

LAWTON: She also has a close circle of friends, chief among them her roommate, Sandy Newcomb, and Sandy’s extended family, whom Mattie called their “kin family.” Jeni says they’ve made all the difference in her life.

SANDY NEWCOMB: I’d like to think in some way that my support of Jeni and Mattie has helped them to be able to do what God wants them to do.

LAWTON: Jeni’s own health continues to deteriorate. She says the most difficult thing is giving up independence and control.

JENI STEPANEK: It’s really hard knowing I will always be the passenger in a car. I will never be driving again. That’s a really, really tough thing when I’m a doer, a giver, a be-er, and you have to be the recipient and call someone and ask them to do something for you. That’s a tough lesson for me.

LAWTON: Although people tell her they’ve felt Mattie’s spirit, Jeni never has.

JENI STEPANEK: And what I would give to have my son come and stand and just say “hi” or “yo,” just say anything, just touch me. But I know that that would be wrong, and I think that my son is wiser than that, because if my son came and spoke to me or touched me, and I knew without doubt this is my son, I so miss him that I’m afraid I’d never emotionally or physically be able to move from that spot.

LAWTON: She says near the end of his life Mattie knew he was dying and tried to prepare her. But she couldn’t accept it.

JENI STEPANEK: It was one of my mommy decisions that I regret. You know, I should’ve just put my arm around him and said that must be really difficult. You must feel very alone. I just, I couldn’t tend to it, and I feel very badly. I will forever feel badly about that. But I don’t think he holds that against me. I think he knew that I was being a mommy.

LAWTON: Still, she says Mattie gave her the hope and faith to move forward.

JENI STEPANEK: He said when I’m gone promise me you will choose to inhale, not breathe merely to exist, and that means finding some worthy reason to move into each next moment, and that’s the most difficult choice I face every single day. But it’s the most worthy choice.

LAWTON: She says she’s learned that it’s not how long you live that matters, but the depth with which you live those days. I’m Kim Lawton in Rockville, Maryland.

BOB FAW, correspondent: Sometimes for an autistic child like Elizabeth, cheered on here by her father—

RAY BREEN (to daughter on bicycle): Turn, turn, turn. You can do it, you can do it, you can do it. Good, good.

FAW: Sometimes there are small victories—

RAY BREEN: Excellent, excellent.

FAW: —and the demons of autism loosen their grip. Too often, though, for Elizabeth there are other moments of seemingly impenetrable darkness and frustration. Unable to speak, Elizabeth communicates now by finding letters on a letterboard or typing into a keyboard. Even that, says her mother Ginnie, does not spare Elizabeth moments of agony.

GINNIE BREEN: I remember so distinctly one of the first things she typed out: A-G-O-N-Y, agony. This was a little six-year-old child, and she knew what agony was, and then she wrote, “I need to talk”—that that was her agony.

FAW: She wasn’t always like this. In her first 15 months, Elizabeth was healthy, active, alert, even verbal. Then she changed drastically.

GINNIE BREEN: Besides the complete loss of language within a week, she did start to have repetitive behavior and have frustrations and tantrums and really kind of left us.

FAW: Researchers suspect genetic and environmental factors cause autism. It is characterized by unconventional facial expressions, limited motor and social skills, and difficulty communicating—a life largely dependent. For Elizabeth’s parents that diagnosis was devastating enough, but they were also told there is no reliable treatment, no guaranteed cure, and ten years later not that much has changed, says Dr. Anthony Rostain, an expert on autism at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

DR. ANTHONY ROSTAIN (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia): It really affects almost every aspect of how the child thinks, acts, feels, and develops both cognitively and emotionally. So, as a result, it’s hard to come up with one-size-fits-all kind of treatment.

FAW: Elizabeth’s parents, Ginnie and Ray, both enjoyed lucrative Wall Street careers but gave them up to focus on their three children and the battle against autism. Early on, behavorial therapy exercises like this, they were told, might help Elizabeth to organize the chaos in her mind, help her to learn how to learn.

Teacher to Elizabeth: Show me jumping. Turn around. Good job. Can you show me sitting? Nice job.

FAW: Since she was three years old, her school district has paid a full-time professional aide to help Elizabeth academically.This is what a respected speech therapist believed might help loosen Elizabeth’s tongue. It turned out to be more fun than effective.There have also been years of special diets and vitamin supplements and homeopathic drops costing hundreds of dollars every month, a $20,000 hyperbaric chamber, which pumps extra oxygen into her brain for an hour every day, even unproven therapies like these prism lenses which distort Elizabeth’s vision in hopes of reordering the way her brain processes information.

FAW: Are you convinced that this has benefits?

GINNIE BREEN: I believe that this has helped other children.

FAW: And several times Elizabeth’s mother has taken her cross-country, seeking healing in prayer services.

GINNIE BREEN: We’ve used educational interventions, medical interventions. Why not spiritual interventions?

FAW: Parents of autistic children face a terrible dilemma. They are forced literally to experiment on their own children because the medical community has not tested and proven those treatments the way it has with treatments for physical conditions like heart disease or cancer.

DR. ROSTAIN: We are in very, very, very early stages of understanding how medications might improve functioning.

FAW: You don’t fault a parent for trying everything conceivable?

DR. ROSTAIN: I don’t, because if I had a child who wasn’t responding to treatments that were prescribed by the doctor, I might very well take that child to someone else and someone else and someone else.

FAW: What has happened to Elizabeth has happened with countless other autistic children—so many interventions with success only hit or miss. Ethicist Arthur Caplan:

PROFESSOR ARTHUR CAPLAN (Center for Bioethics, University of Pennsylvania): I could take you online and find tons of quacks, rip-off artists, selling quote unquote “treatments” to parents of kids with autism. It is a huge problem.

FAW: It is also an ethical minefield: Does society have the responsibility and can it afford to help autistic children who lack the resources lavished on Elizabeth? If so, should that task fall, as it mostly now does, on local public schools?

PROFESSOR CAPLAN: You can’t do it that way. Obviously, different school districts have different amounts of money. We need a national policy to divvy up resources to autistic kids, not the school board budget. That makes no sense at all.

FAW: One intervention which has worked well for Elizabeth began five years ago in Austin, Texas with language therapist Soma Mukhopadhyay, who taught Elizabeth to use the letterboard. Then, a stunning turn in Elizabeth’s life: At the urging of her personal education aide, Terri Bird, Elizabeth began writing powerful, often deeply personal poetry, turning some of her frustration into inspiration, and for the first time, those around Elizabeth discovered her inner voice. For example: “…It’s not easy, you see, it’s very hard being me. / There is so much going on in my mind / All of the time.”

FAW (to Elizabeth): Why do you write poems?

Elizabeth types out the word F-E-E-L-I-N-G-S

FAW: Your feelings—that’s why you write poems. Elizabeth is, says her mother, “a very spiritual child,” and some of her poems are religious.

GINNIE BREEN (reads from poem “God Loves You”): It does not matter who you are / It does not matter if you stray far / God is always there for you…

FAW: Elizabeth has written 90 poems thus far. Many reveal her yearning to be heard.

GINNIE BREEN (reads from poem “Me”): If only they could walk in my shoes / They would share my news / I am in here / And trying to speak / Every day in some kind of way.

FAW: Sentiments echoed in this anthem written for children with autism.

Vocal music: “Oh, don’t you know I’m trying to find a way to show you who I am…”

FAW: Because she can communicate, Elizabeth, accompanied by Terri, also attends a mainstream public school where she excels especially in math.

TEACHER: Find the greatest common factor of 18 and 24?

Elizabeth types the number 6.

TEACHER: Good girl.

FAW: Her teachers marvel at her performance and persistence.

KERRI BENSON (Math Teacher): She’s taught me about patience, and I just, I can’t even begin to explain that I’ve probably learned more for her than anybody in life so far.

FAW: Elizabeth is warmly received by other students. Besides writing, Elizabeth can read with remarkable speed, and Terri tests her comprehension.

TERRI BIRD (Education Aide): Doing this job with Elizabeth is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done in my life.

FAW: Elizabeth’s success and her failures—this two-steps-forward, one step back—have been physically exhausting and emotionally draining for her and her family. It has also severely tested her mother’s faith.

GINNIE BREEN: It’s a natural thing to cry out where are you, God? I mean, I’m calling here in the darkness, and I can’t take too much more sometimes.

FAW: And though she on occasion has wavered, her beliefs have emerged stronger.

(to Ginnie Breen): Has it reinforced you faith?

GINNIE BREEN: Absolutely. There are times I know that we are being blessed on the right path here, and I’ll pray about it, and we’ll move forward.

FAW: Whether Elizabeth will eventually speak is, at best, a long shot. She may, her mother concedes, always need assistance, which is why in this household success is measured one day, one small victory, at a time.

GINNIE BREEN: I want to be able to say I have done everything to make my little girl talk. I mean, how can I hear her say, “I’m in agony because I can’t speak” and not try something? The data may say only one percent, but if that one percent is Elizabeth, that’s all I need, and she wants us to keep trying.

FAW: For Religion and Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Bob Faw in Northern New Jersey.

Psalm 23

A psalm, by David.

God is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You lay me down in lush meadows.
You guide me toward tranquil waters,
reviving my soul.
You lead me down paths of righteousness
for that is your nature.
And when I walk though the valley, overshadowed by death,
I will fear no harm, for you are with me.
Your rod and staff—they comfort me.
You spread a table before me
in the face of my greatest fears.
You drench my head with oil;
my cup overflows past the brim.
Surely goodness and kindness
will accompany me all the days of my life
and I will have dwelt in the house of the Holy
for the length of my days.

Psalm 32

By David, a psalm of understanding.

Blessed is the one who lifts up her transgressions to God;
her sins will be forgiven.

Blessed is the one for whom the Holy One
need not reckon his faults;
whose spirit is clean of deceit.

When I ploughed the fields in silence,
my bones wasted away;
they groaned all day as I worked.

For day and night your hand weighed heavy against me;
the juice of my breast went dry, like the brittle fruit of summer–Selah.

I made my sin known to you.
My wrongs I no longer attempted to hide.

I said, I will confess my rebellions to the Eternal–
and you forgave my sins and errors–Selah.

For this, let the one who loves you
pray at any time she can find–
do not let the flood of waters overtake her.

You are a hiding place for me,
protecting me from anguish.
You surround me with a loud cry of rescue–Selah.

I will enlighten and illumine for you
the path you should walk.
My eyes will give witness.

Don’t be like a horse,
a mule without understanding
with a bridle and halter put on to restrain it.

In such a way God cannot approach you.

Many are the pains of those who persist in their wrongs,
but those who trust in their Creator are surrounded by love.

Take joy in God and let the righteous rejoice.
Cry out with gladness, all who are steadfast of heart.

Psalm 90

A prayer of Moses, man of God.

God, you have been a dwelling place for us
from one generation to the next.

Before mountains were born,
before earth and its people came to exist.

From eternity until eternity you are holy.

Mortals can turn to you until they are crushed.
You say, “Return, children of Adam.”

Because a thousand years you can hold in your sight
like a yesterday passing into today,
a watchman’s hour of relief at night.

You flood the years; they pass like sleep.
By morning, they vanish like grass.

At dawn a person flowers and is fragrant;
by evening we become withered and dry.

For by your wrath we are extinguished.
By your anger we are made to feel afraid.

You have laid out our transgressions before you,
our secrets are illumined by the light of your face.

All our hours pass by in your fury.
Our years come to an end as though imagined.

The days of our years are seventy;
if we are strong, maybe eighty.

All our boasts are toil and delusion,
because life passes and rushes and flies away.

Who can bear the force of your rejection?
Our fear of you seems to us like your anger.

Make known to us the portion of our days
so that we may gain a heart of wisdom.

Turn back to us, God—-Oh, how long?
Have compassion on those trying to serve your will.

Fill our morning with acts of your kindness
and we will sing and rejoice all our days.

Bring us joy in proportion to our days of affliction,
years we saw only strife.

May your acts be visible to your servants,
your splendor to their children’s eyes.

May the sweetness of the Holy One, our Creator,
be constantly before us.

And the work of our hands, give us direction.
And the work of our hands–give it direction toward you.

Psalm 27

By David.

You are my light and my hope,
whom should I fear?

You are the strength of my life,
before whom should I tremble?

When the wrongful approach to devour my flesh,
my oppressors and enemies,
it is they who stumble and fall.

If an encampment pitches tents against me,
my heart will not quiver.

If a war rises up against me,
in you I still trust:

One thing I have asked from you,
one thing I seek,

to dwell in your house
all the days of my life,

to behold your beauty,
to enter your innermost temple.

You cover me with the tabernacle of your presence
on days when hardship comes.

You shield me in concealment of your tent.
Upon a rock, you lift me high from harm.

And now, God, raise my head above troubles that surround me.

In your tent, I will make my songs into offerings,
singing forth all my melodies to your name.

Listen, God, to my voice when I call out.
With compassion, answer my need.

It is to you my heart calls,
“Seek out my face,”
because your face, God, is what I constantly search for.

Don’t hide your eyes from me.
Don’t push away your faithful in anger.

You have always been my help.

Don’t tear me out by the roots;
don’t abandon me–

for you are the one I count on for help.

My father and mother may leave me,
but you have gathered me in.

Teach me, Source of Joy, your ways.
and lead me down the level plain
because of the dangers that surround me on every side.

Don’t give me over to breath of my fears.

For distortions have risen up in name of truth,
they breathe out visions of destruction.

If only I could believe that I would see God’s goodness
in the land of the living…

Keep up your hope in God.
Strengthen your heart and sturdy it;
Keep up your hope in God.

For many poets, believers and nonbelievers alike, it is possible to talk about the religious imagination they bring to apprehending reality and describing the world.

Theologically, Christianity provides a language—and some doctrinal and historical metaphors or benchmarks—for two such imaginations: the sacramental and the dialectical. The first is broadly linked to Catholic ways of seeing and understanding God and the world, and the second, equally broadly and generally, to a Protestant sensibility.

George Herbert

Drawing on the work of Catholic theologian David Tracy, University of Notre Dame theology professor Mary Catherine Hilkert, in her book NAMING GRACE, gives a useful and succinct definition of the two imaginations: “The dialectical imagination stresses the distance between God and humanity, the hiddeness and absence of God, the sinfulness of human beings, the paradox of the cross, the need for grace as redemption and reconciliation…and the not-yet character of the promised reign of God. The sacramental imagination…emphasizes the presence of the God who is self-communicating love, the creation of human beings in the image of God…the mystery of the incarnation.”

Both imaginations reach deep into the history of English poetry. One can feel and touch the sacramental in the metaphors of the great religious poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. It perhaps most fully flowered in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who characterized the incarnation in the lovely but surprising phrase “God’s infinity / Dwindled to infancy.” It is a poetry that closely observes and celebrates the material world as the arena or playground of the Lord.

Paul Mariani, a fine poet of this generation but perhaps better known for his biographies of Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, William Carlos Williams, John Berryman and, most recently, Hopkins, offers a good working definition of the sacramental imagination as language that “pays homage to the splendid grittiness of the physical as well as to the splendor and consolation of the spiritual.”

In a similar vein, literary critic and Gettysburg College English professor Peter Stitt, in his book THE WORLD’S HIEROGLYPHIC BEAUTY, a study of five mid-twentieth century American poets (Richard Wilbur, William Stafford, Louis Simpson, James Wright, and Robert Penn Warren), writes that all of them “love the physical world to such a degree that they sense within it some transcendent meaning, some hovering aura of belief.” Stitt notes that because Wilbur and Warren, for example, believe “that something sacred is to be found within reality, they do not feel required to abandon the physical in order to find the spiritual.” The sacramental imagination can, indeed, be summed up in the title of Wilbur’s great poem, “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.”

The sacramental imagination has always been strong, but it seems particularly ascendant in contemporary poetry and criticism. Perhaps it is because there is something of a religious revival going on among intellectuals and artists not unlike that of a half-century ago; certainly there seems to be an abundance of religious themes in current film, fiction and music.

William Cowper

Unfortunately, however, that dominance makes it more difficult to hear and understand—or grant religious legitimacy to—the dialectical imagination. But poetry where the dialectical imagination is dominant, stressing the distance between God and the human and experiencing the world as a place where God is silent or absent, also has a long and distinguished pedigree in English poetry and hymnody.

Donald Davie suggests as much in his discussion of poet and hymnist William Cowper (1731-1800) in his introduction to THE NEW OXFORD BOOK OF CHRISTIAN VERSE. Davie notes of the first line—“Sometimes a light surprises”—of Cowper’s poem/hymn “Joy and Peace is Believing”: “One may have read this poem, or more probably sung it, many and many a time before realizing that the crucial word in it is the first: ‘Sometimes’—only sometimes, not always, not even very often!” The usual relationship between God and believer in Cowper’s imagination is distance rather than presence.

Similarly, in what is perhaps Cowper’s most famous poem, the first line (“Oh, for a closer walk with God”) stresses absence, an absence the second stanza only underscores: “Where is the blessedness I knew / When first I saw the Lord? / Where is the soul-refreshing view / Of Jesus and his word?”

In the twentieth century, one of the greatest poets of the dialectical imagination was the Welsh Anglican priest R.S. Thomas (1913-2000). Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams called him “as influential as T.S. Eliot in religious circles,” and one critic designated Thomas “a poet of the Cross, the unanswered prayer, the bleak trek through darkness.” His powerful poem “The Porch” needs little explication:

      Do you want to know his name?
      It is forgotten. Would you learn
      what he was like? He was like
      anyone else, a man with ears
      and eyes. Be it sufficient
      that in a church porch on an evening
      in winter, the moon rising, the frost
      sharp, he was driven to his knees and for no reason
      he knew. The cold came at him;
      his breath was carved angularly
      as the tombstones; an owl screamed.

      He had no power to pray.
      His back turned on the interior
      he looked out on a universe
      that was without knowledge
      of him and kept his place
      there for an hour on that lean
      threshold, neither outside nor in.

R.S. Thomas

God’s absence, wrote Thomas, was for him like a presence “that compels me to address it without hope of a reply.”

One of the most difficult cases to critically deal with in trying to use religious categories is the poet who is an avowed nonbeliever but whose poetry is rich with religious resonances, themes, and iconography. Such a poet was Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), who was not a practicing Christian herself and was sometimes scathing in her dismissal of Christians as dogmatic and judgmental. But as Scripps College modern languages professor Cheryl Walker suggests in her fine and challenging, though sometimes uneven, study GOD AND ELIZABETH BISHOP, “She lived poetically, and in a sense religiously.”

Without using the language of the sacramental and dialectical, Walker’s study suggests that Bishop was a first-rate poet of the dialectical imagination who longed to perceive the world in sacramental terms, but was generally unable to. God’s presence was just not there. Like sacramental poets, such as her rough contemporary Richard Wilbur, Bishop was a close and careful observer of the material world, the local and the ordinary. Her observations revealed the absence of transcendence rather than the presence of God, but the poetry was no less religious for that perception.

Walker divides her study of Bishop into chapters exploring different Christian concepts and theological themes—time and eternity, the fall, love and longing, justice and charity, suffering, and “assent.” She draws out of Bishop’s poetry and prose the religious possibilities that are either on or just below the surface.

Walker is especially concerned to look at Bishop in light of the poet’s reading of Catholic mystics, especially St. John of the Cross. She is careful not to overwhelm the poems with interpretation or create for them a theological Procrustean bed, but she also candidly admits the poet’s dialectical imagination. In the poem “Squatter’s Children,” for example, about the lives of poor Brazilian people on the hills surrounding Rio de Janeiro, Walker sees that “we are once again confronted by the deus absconditus, the absent God who looks down on the children of the poor seemingly without much interest.” She identifies one of Bishop’s most moving poems, “One Art,” as “a religious poem without a God to offer grace.”

Elizabeth Bishop

Even when one quibbles with some of the fine points of Walker’s reading, it is a rewarding and—for those who equate the dialectical imagination with a secular antagonism to things religious—surprising tour through the work of one of the premier poets of the middle of the last century. Bishop loved old hymns and the poetry of George Herbert, knew the Bible well, and read theology all her life. Still, the spiritual did not present itself to her “as a tenable substance,” observes Walker, quoting the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, “but, rather, through its absence.”

“To be of two minds was characteristic of Elizabeth Bishop,” Walker writes. “She could never quite relinquish the desire to believe, though a settled faith eluded her.” Precisely.  And therein lies the tension between the sacramental imagination of presence and the dialectical imagination of absence. Both offer rich possibilities for a poetry that speaks powerfully of and to the modern world.

David E. Anderson is senior editor at Religion News Service. He wrote most recently for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Charles Taylor’s A SECULAR AGE.

In A FAREWELL TO ARMS, Ernest Hemingway famously wrote about the dim possibility of adequate commemoration for those lost in the slaughter of World War I:

“I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the number of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

When Hemingway wrote, war poetry was still poised between the old and durable need to honor the dead and acknowledge with both regret and proper gratitude the dire nature of their civic contribution, and the second and more unsettling need to voice the sometimes dishonored and dishonoring terms of that sacrifice — the anguished appearance of war guilt for crimes perpetrated during the course of war by some of these sacrificial victims, the soldiers.

By the second half of the last century, war poetry came to embody an antiwar ideology. Judgments about politics and history have thoroughly rearranged the conventions of the war poem and have changed the way we look at courage and honor, as well as sacrifice. Part of what has happened is also an awareness of the bastardizing of public language, although I shrink from any judgment that things are any worse now for words than they ever were. It has never been easy to speak well about the moving target of difficult issues like war. There are certainly always new problems and new situations, as we think about justifying war and are faced with the horrifying results…Any war, no matter how victoriously prosecuted, is of course always a defeat for the civilized impulse, for the need to come up with other than violent resolution of conflict. And then there is the deadening of language that happens with the incessant barrage of public communication — “compassion fatigue,” in journalism professor Susan Moeller’s phrase.

But here I like to think of Maya Lin’s serene and wise description of how language is subverted, and memory served, by her brilliant memorial for the American dead of Vietnam:

“I always saw the wall as pure surface, an interface between light and dark, where I cut the earth and polished its open edge. The wall dematerializes as a form and allows the names to become the object, a pure and reflective surface that would allow visitors the chance to see themselves with the names. I do not think I thought of the color black as a color, more as the idea of a dark mirror into a shadowed mirror image of the space, a space we cannot enter and from which the names separate us, an interface between the world of the living and the world of the dead.”

Here is “Facing It,” Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem about encountering the Vietnam Veterans Memorial:

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn’t,
dammit: No tears.
I’m stone. I’m flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way — the stone lets me go.
I turn that way — I’m inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap’s white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman’s blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird’s
wings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.
A white vet’s image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I’m a window.
He’s lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman’s trying to erase names:
No, she’s brushing a boy’s hair.

Even the title gives us some clue about the difficult act that the poem covers. Facing “it” is hard: first, the swelling tears have to be acknowledged, the hard swarm of the memories, and the realization that the black, glassy, and highly reflective surface of the memorial itself forces a look inside oneself, as well as a look outward, back to a specific name, to someone who went up in a white, booby-trapped flash. The memorial also insists that inside and outside the self are hard to separate, and that the separation of past and present is equally difficult, as we inevitably carry the past within our present. Among the other fusions that a visit to the memorial affirms, we are made to see that we are always at one with the living and the dead, and that as a nation, black and white, we face similar grief and loss. “I’m a window,” says the poem’s speaker; through me, other people’s losses come to the surface. At the memorial we meet as a community, however disparate.

And then, simply but powerfully, the poem moves to a self-correction. At first, a woman’s gesture reflected in the stone seems a hostile one of erasure. The woman is attempting to scrub away at the names. Then it becomes clear to the speaker, and to us, that the gesture is homely, loving, and domestic: a mother, presumably a surviving relative of one of the names, bends to comb a boy’s hair, to make him more presentable to the dead. It is an homage she is paying, and it is that unadorned homage and that respect with which the poet chooses to end.

Lorrie Goldensohn is the editor of AMERICAN WAR POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY
(Columbia University Press) and the author of DISMANTLING GLORY: TWENTIETH-CENTURY SOLDIER POETRY (Columbia University Press), which was nominated for the 2004 National Book Critics Circle Award.

“If I had not discovered Hopkins, I would have had to invent him,” poet and biographer Paul Mariani wrote in “Hopkins as Lifeline,” an essay recalling his first encounter as a college student in 1962 with nineteenth-century poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. It has been a long and fruitful relationship, including a doctoral thesis Mariani revised and published as A COMMENTARY ON THE COMPLETE POEMS OF GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (Cornell University Press, 1970), more than a dozen scholarly articles, essays, and reviews, and now his full-length biography, GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS: A LIFE (Viking, 2008). It is a fine contribution to Hopkins scholarship, an often illuminating but sometimes uneven look at the Christ-haunted Victorian poet whose work, although never published in his lifetime, came into its own in the second half of the twentieth century, exerted a major influence on such poets as Elizabeth Bishop and John Berryman, and continues to influence young poets and attract the scrutiny of academics.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

Mariani begins his biography with Hopkins’s most famous and indelible line, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God,’’ and he hangs on that line, composed in Wales in 1877 while Hopkins was working his way through the rigorous process of becoming a Jesuit priest, much of the contours of Hopkins’s life. “He believed it from his undergraduate years at Oxford as an Anglican seeker,’’ Mariani writes. “Believed it so strongly that it led in large part to his conversion to the Roman Catholic Church. Believed it as a Jesuit, and called on both Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises and the insights of the philosopher Duns Scotus into Christ’s Incarnation to formulate a theodicy and a poetics which would articulate and sing what his whole self—head and heart—felt.”

That is the strength but also one of the weaknesses of Mariani’s portrait. He is brilliant at explicating Hopkins’s poetry and many of the religious and theological impulses that give the poetry its force and meaning, and his mining of the journals and letters provides the data for Hopkins’s difficult relationship with the priesthood. But Hopkins the person is often missing.

Gerard Manley Hopkins was born on July 28, 1844, the eldest of nine children of a prosperous middle- to upper-middle-class family. He went to a very good grammar school, Highgate, where he excelled academically and in 1863 won a scholarship to Balliol, one of the best colleges at Oxford.

It is at Oxford in 1863—when Hopkins was 22 and caught up in contentious religious controversies that swirled through the school, particularly reconsiderations of the Church of England’s relationship with the Roman Catholic Church—that Mariani begins his narrative. Apparently a deeply pious but religiously conflicted young man, Hopkins was, as Mariani tells it, on the edge of the epiphany that “for complex reasons” he needed to become a Roman Catholic and a Jesuit priest. “So give it a day, a date, a going forth, a crossing over, all in an instant, finally, a yes and a yes again.…Call it what he would with its wondrous, irresistible forces working on him. The instress of it, like the ooze of virgin oil crushed in the press of God’s hands, an anointing, a yielding, a yes.” Instress, of course, is one of Hopkins’s coined words with a less than static meaning, but it generally points to the impulse or energy given off by an inscape—another of Hopkins’s words signifying the essential meaning or uniqueness of a thing or experience.

From his lyrical portrait of Hopkins’s decision to “go over” to Rome and, further, become a Jesuit, Mariani backfills with a dash of Hopkins’s family and a splash of his schooling. Neither, however, comes fully alive, nor are they fully realized. The result is that in some sense neither is Hopkins. In particular, one would have liked a fuller discussion of the religious revival that was the Oxford Movement, its efforts to renew the Anglican Church’s Catholic inheritance, and the panoply of religious currents and crosscurrents—Tractarians, Ritualists, High Church Anglicanism, Broad Church Anglicanism, and Roman Catholicism—that were so much a part of the intellectual milieu at Oxford when Hopkins was there, and how the young man worked his way through them to his ultimate decision to convert. Additionally, a fuller discussion of Hopkins’s Oxford life beyond the conversion decision would have helped round out the spiritually anguished but religiously and academically questing Hopkins, especially a more full-bodied rendering of friends, companions, and correspondents such as the very important Robert Bridges (poet, physician, and hymn writer who became Hopkins’s editor and literary executor) and the scholar Alexander Baillie, as well as Oxford tutors such as art and literary critic Walter Pater and the classicist and theologian Benjamin Jowett.

Robert Bridges

We do get this description of Hopkins at school as he contemplates conversion: “And while he (Hopkins) can joke and banter with the best of them, he seems tired, tired beyond his years, tired of standing on the sidelines as the great appetitive world spins on.” It is also the first reference to what will be a red thread running throughout Hopkins’s life—tiredness, a weariness that seems to be part existential despair, part recurring physical illness.

Might it have something to do with Hopkins’s struggle with his sexuality? One of the curious lacunae in Mariani’s book is any serious discussion of Hopkins and sex, especially the contentious issue of whether Hopkins was homosexual. A number of writers, including critics Denis Donoghue and Brad Leithauser, as well biographer Robert Bernard Martin in his 1991 life of Hopkins, have all made the suggestion, even assertion, that Hopkins was gay. On the other hand, editor and author Justus George Lawler, in his study HOPKINS RECONSTRUCTED (Continuum, 1998), has sharply questioned the contention. It may well be irresolvable, but one wishes Mariani had taken up the issue.

Here, too, as Hopkins’s life plays out at Oxford, it might have been helpful if Mariani discussed the influence of the Victorian writer and critic John Ruskin on Hopkins’s poetry and the aesthetic theory he developed. At least one critic, Philip Ballinger, in “The Poem as Sacrament,” a monograph on Hopkins’s theological aesthetic, has argued that Ruskin may be as important as Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuits, and Duns Scotus, the late-thirteenth-century scholastic philosopher and theologian, in shaping Hopkins’s work.

After converting to Catholicism, Hopkins joined the Jesuits in 1868, burning most of his early poems in the process and believing that writing poetry would “interfere with my life and vocation.” Becoming a Jesuit seems to be a decision he never regretted, but as Mariani makes painfully clear, it was not generally a good fit either for Hopkins or for the Jesuits, who apparently did not know what to make of the odd and anguished young man, the eccentric but brilliant novice and, later, priest.

Drawing heavily on Hopkins’s letters and journals, Mariani is at his best as he follows Hopkins’s career in the Jesuits through a series of postings—first study, then parish and teaching assignments in four countries ending in Ireland, where he remained until his death.

After destroying most of his undergraduate poetry, Hopkins did not write again until 1875, when he was encouraged by one of his superiors to write a poem on the sinking of the German steamship Deutschland and the deaths of five Franciscan nuns who were on board, exiled from Germany by anti-Catholic laws. It is Hopkins’s first real effort at what he calls “sprung rhythm,” a rhythm generated by “scanning by accents or stresses alone, without any account of the number of syllables, so that a foot may be one strong syllable or it may be many light and one strong.” In a brilliant 12-page explication of “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” which many consider to be the best of Hopkins’s poems, Mariani makes accessible the theology and aesthetics of the very difficult verse. Hopkins submitted the poem to the Jesuit publication The Month, but it was apparently obscure and too hard for the editors to understand, and it was rejected.

Pleasure Grounds, Clongowes Wood College, County Kildare from HOPKINS IN IRELAND by Michael Flecky, SJ

Catholic writer Ron Hansen’s richly imagined novel EXILES (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008) also takes as its subject Hopkins’s return to writing poetry and the shipwreck that inspired him. Hansen, best known for his powerful fiction-writing and his novels MARIETTE IN ECSTASY and ATTICUS, is also the Gerard Manley Hopkins S.J. Professor in the Arts and Humanities at Santa Clara University. His new Hopkins novel, he said recently in remarks made at Georgetown University, is “all about outsiders”—priests and nuns and writers, too, who are “not part of the general herd.” The book juxtaposes two stories of exile—the five German nuns who were persecuted at home and are en route to a country not their own, the United States, when the Deutschland went down, and the thwarted, unread and unrecognized poet-priest, with his own sharp sense of separation and estrangement, who immortalized the nuns in his verse. As Hansen imagines it, Hopkins accepted the poem’s rejection (“Whether he published his poetry or not seemed to the conscientious Hopkins another vagary over which a good Jesuit should exercise no partiality”) and went on not long afterward to write “a clutch of poems that were so original and are now so esteemed that 1877 has since been considered his annus mirabilis, Hopkins’s miracle year.”

Mariani makes for engrossing reading as he writes of the burst of creativity during the months after writing “The Wreck of the Deutschland” and before Hopkins’s ordination, in which he wrote some of the poems that have come to define his contribution to modern poetry, including “God’s Grandeur,” “The Starlight Night,” “Spring,” “The Windhover,” and the untitled sonnet “As kingfishers catch fire,” which is among the finest religious poems of the nineteenth or any century. “The kingfishers sonnet is about the Scotist individuation of things,” Mariani writes of the poem’s theological roots in the medieval Duns Scotus, “where…the opening lines flame out, and where things reveal themselves.…But more: it is about Christ playing—acting in all seriousness, at the same time delighting in the never-again-to-be-replaced distinctiveness of human beings in ten thousand separate places and revealed in the faces of those who keep God’s graces”:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;
Selves – goes itself; myself it speaks and spells
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;
Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;
Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is –
Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places
Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his
To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

But despite the incarnational glory of these poems, Hopkins continues to be plagued by a weariness that is both mental and physical. “Elation and depression: bordering on the bipolar in Hopkins’s mood swings,” Mariani notes. “For if he is capable of composing a poem like ‘God’s Grandeur,’ of singing ‘sometimes the sweetest, sweetest spells,’ his spirit can also droop as much as any caged songbird….”

On the evidence of Hopkins’s letters and journals, it is apparent the theology of Jesuit founder Ignatius Loyola, with its notion that Christian believers could encounter God in all of creation, provided as much of the theological underpinnings for his best incarnational and sacramental poetry as did Duns Scotus. At the same time, Hopkins was evidently temperamentally and physically ill-suited for the order and its exhausting regimen of study, teaching, grading papers, and parish work, including preaching and visiting the sick. The menial chores drove him, time and again, to the brink of breakdown and exhaustion throughout his short life.

The Jesuits seemed at a loss for how best to make use of the odd, eccentric but also very likable Hopkins. Certainly his devotion to Scotus put him out of the mainstream of Jesuit thinking at the time and raised suspicions among his superiors, who favored Thomas Aquinas for his understanding of the unity of all things over the individual “thisness” of Scotus: “that which makes this oak tree this oak tree only, or this rose this rose only, or this person this person only, and not another—something unique and separate, God’s infinite and incredible freshness of Creation every nanosecond of every day, world without end,” as Mariani describes it.

John Henry Newman

That fact may have had something to do with Hopkins’s failure to pass, with sufficiently high marks, the exams that would allow him to become a fully professed Jesuit, a major blow to any career ambitions but perhaps also a blow to his self-esteem. His poor health, as well, seems to have contributed to his superiors’ decision not to let him go for the fourth year of theological studies and the professional certification that would bring. “And though he is heartsick over the news, he will keep this to himself like the good soldier he is and serve wherever he is sent,” Mariani writes.

“Wherever he is sent” finally meant Ireland for a “reluctant and apprehensive” Hopkins and an assignment teaching at University College Dublin, established by John Henry Newman to compete with the richer and Protestant Trinity College. But it was soul-wearying work for which Hopkins could find no purpose, Mariani writes. There are some poems that get written in what might be called Hopkins’s Irish exile, but they are much darker than his Welsh poems, more anguished and full of self-loathing though no less faithful to his vision of God. Mariani finds Hopkins in these last years of his life dwelling “on his own bouts of near madness, melancholy, darkness, despair, even thoughts of suicide.” So Hopkins writes:

I am gall, I am heartburn. God’s most deep decree
Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;
Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.
Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see
The lost are like this, and their scourge to be
As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

Hopkins’s bleak, brooding, and beleaguered final years in Ireland have been exquisitely captured in the black-and-white photographs of Michael Flecky, S.J., a professor of photography and fine arts at Creighton University, and recently published in the book HOPKINS IN IRELAND: PICTURES AND WORDS (Creighton University Press, 2008). Drawing on letters, poems, and spiritual journals, the pictures are of country places Hopkins visited during retreats and vacations, the Dublin landscape he encountered, the monastery, college, and seminary grounds he walked, and the Jesuit community and university buildings where he lived and died. The elegiac sequence of pictures is paired with excerpts from the writings of Hopkins and his commentators to offer a visual illumination of his poetic and spiritual life.

Hopkins died on June 8, 1889, just six weeks short of his 45th birthday. He was diagnosed with typhus, but Mariani suspects it was complicated by Crohn’s disease, a sickness unnamed until 1932. Hopkins’s last words, repeated over and over, were an affirmation—or a plea to himself: “I am so happy. I am so happy.” He died unheralded and unpublished, and it was not until 1918 that Oxford University Press published an edition of 750 copies of the poems edited and introduced by his old friend, England’s then poet laureate, Robert Bridges.

A decade before his death, however, Hopkins ruminated on the question of fame in an exchange of correspondence with his friend, fellow poet, and Anglican cleric Richard Watson Dixon. “Fame,” Hopkins wrote, “is a thing which lies in the award of a random, reckless, incompetent, and unjust judge, the public, the multitude. The only just judge, the only just literary critic is Christ, who prizes, is proud of, and admires, more than any man, more than the receiver himself can, the gifts of his own making.”

Nearly a century later, John Berryman, a poet as singular as Hopkins, would appropriate Hopkins in one his last poems, a poem of his own religious conversion:

Father Hopkins said the only true literary critic is Christ.
Let me lie down exhausted, content with that.

It is an appropriate signal of how Hopkins’s fame and, more importantly, his influence have grown and spread since that first slim edition of 750 poems until now, the first decade of the 21st century, and how he has become a central part of the modern canon. While Auden pronounced himself “uneasy” at the intensity of Hopkins’s confessional mode, others celebrate and emulate what Robert Lowell called his “inebriating exuberance.” Poets as radically different as Hart Crane and Elizabeth Bishop have acknowledged their indebtedness, and his complex rhythms, his stretching of conventional structures to the near breaking point coupled with his intensely sacramental view of the world have been major influences on poetry for a century.

In 1975, Hopkins was memorialized with a plaque in Westminster Abbey’s Poet’s Corner, set between those recognizing T.S. Eliot and W.H. Auden—the first Catholic since John Dryden and the first Roman Catholic priest ever to be so honored. The real honor, however, is that his poetry continues to be read, and his vision of a world charged with the presence of God continues to move and claim readers.

David E. Anderson, senior editor at Religion News Service, has also written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on Walt Whitman, John Donne, William Shakespeare, and American religious poems.

by David E. Anderson

The link between religion and poetry has largely been lost to the popular mind in the Western world, especially in the United States. Even the minority of Americans who regularly read volumes of poetry rarely treat them as sacred texts or scripture, and poetry for the most part is not read as a guide to living, as many read the Bible, the Qur’an, or the Bhagavad Gita.

Walt Whitman

Of course, many poets today write on sacred themes, take up religious issues, and have recourse to the language and motifs of the transcendent and the numinous. There are any number of anthologies and collections that demonstrate the religious concerns of poets over time, such as the Library of America’s American Religious Poems, edited by Harold Bloom, or the slim but interesting Poetry of Piety, an annotated anthology of 28 Christian poems analyzed by New Testament professor Ben Witherington III and English professor Christopher Mead Armitage, or A Sacrifice of Praise, an immense 800-page collection of Christian poetry spanning thirteen centuries, edited by James Trott. Sometimes a single poet will organize a volume around a religious motif, such as Wendell Berry’s Sabbaths, or Geoffrey Hill’s The Triumph of Love, or sequences such as T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and John Berryman’s series “Eleven Addresses to the Lord” in his Love & Fame.

None of this poetry, however, is received or read as scripture, nor are the poets acclaimed as prophets and religious teachers or revered as Christ-figures.

Such was not always the case.

Before the twentieth century there was a long tradition of the poet as prophet and seer, and poetry as a form of religious language. The Hebrew Bible is replete with poetry, not only in the songs that make up the Book of Psalms but also in the inspired utterances of prophets such as Isaiah and Jeremiah. As Michael Robertson, a professor of English at the College of New Jersey, points out in Worshipping Walt (Princeton University Press, 2008), his recent study of Walt Whitman and his disciples, “the idea of the poet-prophet remains alive in non-Western cultures such as India, where ‘poet-saints’ like Kabir are revered, and Vietnam, where the Cao Dai sect regards Victor Hugo as a prophet.” As recently as 150 years, Robertson adds, many Americans and Britons were similarly prepared to accept the creative writer as a divinely inspired figure. He cites William Blake (1757-1827) as the first modern artist to be widely regarded as a poet-prophet, and many readers saw in Walt Whitman Blake’s natural successor as religious seer.

Whitman’s career, from his early writing apprenticeship as journalist, printer, and teacher in the 1830s and 1840s through the succeeding editions of Leaves of Grass, beginning in 1855, was a time of religious and intellectual ferment and political turmoil in America. Developments in science were undermining settled Christian orthodoxies, the anti-slavery movement was giving rise to debates over the meaning of democracy, and new religious movements, such as Mormonism, Spiritualism, and Theosophy were changing the spiritual landscape of antebellum America.

Anne Gilchrist

David Kuebrich, in his groundbreaking study recovering the religious dimension of Whitman’s work, Minor Prophecy: Walt Whitman’s New American Religion (Indiana University Press, 1990), notes three elements in Whitman’s contemporary culture that are important for understanding the poet’s spirituality and the religious vision at the heart of Leaves of Grass: the Romantic religious worldview, including but not limited to American Transcendentalism; the new discoveries in evolutionary thought in geology, astronomy, and biology; and the doctrines of perfectionism and millennialism that pervaded mid-century Protestant thinking. Whitman was familiar with and influenced by everything from the nascent Sunday school movement to the revivals of Charles Finney, as well as the popular phrenology phenomenon. But it is important to understand that Whitman appropriated elements of these currents not within a personal Christian theology or spirituality, but in a far more generalized sense. They were background elements for his own post-Christian religion.

Whitman’s self-understanding as a prophet and founder of a new American religion was already being developed when he came upon Ralph Waldo Emerson, but Emerson’s definition of the poet as a religious prophet, as well as his private praise for the first edition of Leaves, which Whitman nevertheless made sure was widely known, gave Whitman the encouragement needed to pursue his vocation. One can sense the unconscious link between the two in an Emerson journal entry in 1836, where he declares, “Make your own Bible,’’ and in Whitman’s 1857 notebook entry: “Leaves of Grass – Bible of the New Religion.”

“The 1860 Leaves of Grass is particularly insistent upon Whitman’s religious intentions,” Robertson writes, “but his interest in writing a new American bible is evident in every version of Leaves of Grass from the 1855 first edition on.”

Whitman believed himself a prophet and regarded Leaves as scripture, as did many of his readers. While he hoped his poetry would find its readers among the mass of working and laboring classes, his most admiring acolytes came from the middle and upper-middle class of literate readers. Robertson chooses nine of the most ardent and articulate, who wrote on Whitman both privately and publicly and left behind a body of work that is invaluable for understanding the religious and spiritual impact of Leaves of Grass over the first 75 years of its reception.

For each of the disciples Robertson studies, the encounter with Leaves of Grass was a profound and life-altering experience. In this they are typical of one another, but they also represent responses to different aspects of the poem – its understanding of nature, its celebration of sexuality, its advocacy of a radical equality and democracy. At the same time, there was a strong desire for each of them to be in the poet’s presence and to draw spiritual sustenance from him. One of them, Anne Gilchrist, read Leaves in such personal terms she packed up her household in England and moved to the United States, at first expecting to marry Whitman but ultimately forging a deep friendship and discipleship that lasted through her ultimate return to England. There she continued to champion the poet and his work. All of them, however, spent a great deal of time in Whitman’s company, and his charismatic personality seemed to work the same kind of influence on them as other religious leaders have had on their followers.

John Burroughs

Some of the true believers Robertson focuses on, such as John Burroughs, Horace Traubel, and the English trio of Oscar Wilde, Edward Carpenter, and John Addington Symonds, continue to be known and studied in American and British academic circles, Others, such as William O’Connor, R.M. Bucke, and J.W. Wallace, as well as Gilchrist, while significant in their own right, have generally faded into contemporary obscurity.

All of the disciples drew from the language of Christianity, the primary religious speech available, to express their fervent feelings about Whitman and the evolving poem that is Leaves of Grass. O’Connor was the first but not the only one to compare Whitman to Jesus, while Burroughs, one of the most influential nature writers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more famous than either Henry David Thoreau or John Muir, found in Leaves “primarily  a gospel and … only secondarily a poem.” That, too, was a view shared by all the followers. In Robertson’s  view, Burroughs “pioneered the spiritualized interpretation of Leaves of Grass that was furthered by subsequent disciples” and that persisted into the 1920s, when a more secular reading of Whitman – and other  texts – moved to the forefront of academic studies.

Gilchrist, a popular science writer, widowed mother of four, and friend of the Rossetti family – Christina, Daniel Gabriel, and Michael – was introduced to Leaves in 1869, fourteen years after the publication of the first edition. She quickly embraced Whitman’s complex celebration of women’s sexual and spiritual equality coupled with praise for motherhood. Robertson argues that Gilchrist, like many Victorian religious progressives, believed that institutionalized Christianity had distorted Christ’s life and that Whitman, as a new Christ, was to bring to humanity a new faith to replace those beliefs shattered by the discoveries of modern science.

Robertson’s trio of British writers – Symonds, Carpenter, and Wilde – were literati attracted to Whitman because of what seemed to them his sanctification of guiltless love between men as well as a religious vision of the ecstatic apprehension of the divine. Of the three, Carpenter – famous in his time for representing a combination of avant-garde poetry, mystical religion, and radical politics aimed at a host of social reforms – was most influenced by Whitman, and in 1874 he would write to a friend a few days after meeting the poet in Camden, New Jersey, “The likeness to Christ is quite marked.” Gilchrist, too, thought Whitman resembled Jesus.

John Addington Symonds

There were efforts by some of the disciples, most notably Horace Traubel, to institutionalize their Whitmanite religion despite the poet’s dismissal of any such efforts in Leaves: “I charge that there be no theory or school founded out of me, / I charge you to leave all free, as I have left all free.” But two months after Whitman’s death, Traubel formed the Walt Whitman Reunion and together with others founded the Walt Whitman Fellowship. Its last meeting was in 1919 at the centennial celebration of Whitman’s birth.

As the original generation of disciples who had been spiritually nourished by both the poetry and the presence of Whitman died off, they were replaced by readers and critics who saw Whitman as a poet – a great one, perhaps – but not as a mighty spiritual force or a prophet with a sacred purpose. Still, as Robertson writes, “the tribe of Walt” was from the beginning intent on rescuing Whitman from obscurity on the one hand and, on the other, from charges of incoherence and obscenity. “Thanks in great part to their efforts,” he concludes, “Whitman’s fame spread rapidly so that, by the time of his death in 1892, he was perhaps the most widely known U. S. poet in both North America and Great Britain.”

Despite the lack of any religious institutionalization of Whitman’s gospel, Robertson finds plenty of anecdotal evidence in contemporary America that Whitman continues to serve as a spiritual guide and that Leave of Grass is often a touchstone in many people’s eclectic spiritual seeking. There is, for example, LeavesofGrass.org, a Web site run by gay rights activist and Quaker Mitchell Gould. A self-described “public historian,” Gould traces Whitman’s links to sailors, gays, and Quakers as the foundation for a provocative reading of the spirituality of Leaves of Grass. Neil Richardson, a community organizer Robertson found in Washington, DC, doesn’t believe Whitman was gay, and though he is not himself a Quaker, he has led sessions he calls a “Walt Whitman Meditation,” based on passages from Whitman’s notebooks and Leaves, at the historic Friends meetinghouse near Dupont Circle. Far from cosmopolitan Washington, Robertson also discovered an annual May 31 birthday celebration of Whitman in Conroe, Texas, where a dozen or so people gather “not for aesthetic pleasure – or not only for that – but for the chance to testify to this poetry’s meaning in their own lives.”

Indeed, it is a singular accomplishment of Robertson’s unusual but compelling study, blending the academic and the personal, that not only does it recover for this century the life-altering impact of Whitman’s poetry on a fascinating group of his first generation of readers, but it also reminds readers of all poetry – not just Whitman’s – that more can be at stake in the reception of a poem than intellectual satisfaction.

David E. Anderson, senior editor for Religion News Service, has written for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly on many writers, including John Donne, Bob Dylan, Shakespeare, Marilynne Robinson, and Alice McDermott.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, an Easter story of faith and hope. Mattie Stepanek is the brilliant, wheelchair-bound Maryland boy with muscular dystrophy who has become a best-selling inspirational poet. Both he and his mother, Jeni Stepanek, suffer from rare but different forms of the disease. Exactly one year ago, Mattie almost died. But — strongly supported by his mother, who is also in a wheelchair — Mattie outlived all expectations and, not yet a teenager, he has become an amazingly mature public speaker and authority on life at the edge of death. Deryl Davis reports.

MATTIE STEPANEK: Thank you all for coming out tonight to hear me talk and to have me sign your books.

DERYL DAVIS: Afflicted by a rare and life-threatening form of muscular dystrophy, Mattie spends most of his days in a wheelchair, breathing with the help of a ventilator. But with two books of poetry on the New York Times best-seller list, he does get around.

He’s read poetry for Paula Zahn, talked peacemaking with former President Jimmy Carter, and hobnobbed with First Lady Laura Bush. He’s received awards for his poetry and his message, which is about faith and hope.

MATTIE: God gives me hope that there is something greater than us, something better and bigger than the here and now, that can help us live.

DAVIS: Mattie came close to death several times last year. Although doctors can’t fully explain his recovery, Mattie believes God saved him for a reason.

MATTIE: I feel that God has given me a very special opportunity that I should not let go to waste. I use the gift he has given me.

DAVIS: That gift, of words, has struck a chord with children and adults around the country.

MATTIE: I want to read a poem about hope. “I need a new hope, a hope that reaches for the stars and does not end in violence or war. A hope that finds cures for diseases.”

DAVIS: At book signings, Mattie talks about his struggle with disease, his desire to be a peacemaker, and his heroes — one of whom is usually seated behind him.

MATTIE: Another big influence who deserves a round of applause is my mom. She keeps my spirit up.

DAVIS: Jeni Stepanek, a divorcee, has already lost three children to Mattie’s disease, which attacks the respiratory system. The oldest child, whom Mattie knew, lived to be four. Jeni watched one of them struggle for two years.

JENI STEPANEK: I knew he was going to die. I knew it. And I rocked him and held him the last two and a half hours of his life. I heard his last breath. I remember that. I remember breathing in as deeply as I could so that I got his last breath.

DAVIS: Jeni learned that she was the carrier of the disease only after being diagnosed with it herself. Her children’s deaths precipitated a spiritual crisis.

JENI: I was in so much pain that I couldn’t even turn to God. I did not feel God in my life. I felt nothingness. I felt despair. No hope. And I just could not understand why this was happening to me, why, again and again.

DAVIS: Today, Jeni says the question is different: not why tragedy happens, but how to go on living with it. A lifelong Roman Catholic, she says the rituals of the Church helped her cope with the loss of her children.

JENI: The fact that I was in the tradition and going to church, and saying the prayers, and doing what I needed to do slowly, as you move further and further away from the wound — the severing of your children from your life — as it begins to heal and scar over. You’re doing these traditional things and you begin to feel the spirituality.

DAVIS: Last Easter, Jeni faced another crisis, as her last child, Mattie, slid into a coma. She thought of praying for a miracle, but decided that wasn’t the right thing to do.

JENI: I really believe in miracles in everyday life. But I also believe that God cannot come down and answer every single prayer in the way that we pray it, because then we don’t have free will.

DAVIS: Instead, Jeni asked God to save Mattie if there was a special plan for his life.

JENI: I prayed, “If there is something that Mattie has, some gift that he has to share with the world, please, please let him live long enough and have the opportunities to do whatever he came here for.”

Mattie and Jeni Stepanek

DAVIS: To his doctors’ surprise, Mattie recovered. His poetry, which he had been writing since age three, was published for the first time and hit the best-seller lists. But Mattie still faces a serious medical situation.

JENI: He lives every single day wavering back and forth between the possibility of early death and the probability of early death, and that’s a heavy emotional load for me, and I’m his mother. He knows every single day if one thing goes wrong, it could be the end of his life.

DAVIS: As for Mattie, he’s learned from his mother not to ask for miracles or to indulge in self-pity.

MATTIE: I never question God. Sometimes I say, “Why me? Why do I have such a hard life? Why do I have this disease? Why do I have siblings who died?” But then I think and say, “Why not me?”

DAVIS: Mattie says he’s already had glimpses of heaven. He says he’s seen angels and imagines becoming one himself someday. But he’s under no illusions about what such talk means.

MATTIE: People ask, you know, “Are you afraid of dying?” I’m afraid of the pain, not the emotions. I know death will be sad for me, sad for a lot of people. But I’m more afraid of the pain of dying.

DAVIS: Mattie and Jeni find comfort and community in their local parish church. She sings in the choir and he often leads a children’s Bible class. While Catholicism is important to them, Jeni says experience has taught her there’s a big difference between religion and spirituality.

JENI: If you embrace something that brings you closer to the spirituality and that one being that you might call God, or Yahweh, or Abba, or Buddha, or Allah — I mean, it doesn’t matter what you call that being so long as you are trying to get to a better place. There are different ways to do that.

MATTIE: It doesn’t matter how you pray. Just pray. All religions are beautiful and they all have one common belief. There’s something bigger and greater than us that can give us and take from us life. It is better than the here and now.

DAVIS: Mattie and Jeni intend to keep spreading that message of hope to others. And although the future may bring new trials, Jeni says they’ll continue to live each day to the fullest.

JENI: You pray for good things to happen. You pray for strength. You pray to understand and to make sense of things. And I try to pray that the best possible outcome happens.

DAVIS: In Washington, I’m Deryl Davis.

ABERNETHY: Unless there is some dramatic cure, Mattie Stepanek is expected to live from a few more months to a few years.

LUCKY SEVERSON (guest anchor): And now a profile of a man who knows a great deal about poetry and a great deal about funerals. He is Thomas Lynch, writer and mortician, and each of his vocations enriches the other.

BOB ABERNETHY: A cold, early spring morning in Milford, Michigan. As he has every day for 30 years, Thomas Lynch sits down to write. He is a successful essayist and, first of all, a poet. But he writes only part time.

His full-time job is across the street. Like his father before him, Lynch is Milford’s funeral director.

THOMAS LYNCH: Where’s the hearse?

ABERNETHY: Poetry and funeral direction may seem strange companions to some, but not to Lynch.

MR. LYNCH: It is the same enterprise: to organize some response to what is unspeakable. We need a way to say unspeakable things, and funerals do. So do poems.

ABERNETHY: On this day, with the family’s permission, we were present at the funeral of a 30-year-old Milford man killed in a motorcycle accident.

MR. LYNCH (to Funeral attendees): Ladies, if you would take a seat. Mass will be starting shortly.

ABERNETHY: Lynch stood with the family as they said goodbye and the casket lid was closed. He believes strongly in the importance to the living of being able to see the dead.

Lynch also values the funeral as a ceremony. Honoring the dead, he says, gives meaning to life.

MR. LYNCH: The fashions have changed, but the fundamental obligation of a funeral to sort of bear witness to a death in the family and to initiate remembrance — that’s pretty much the same.

ABERNETHY: Earlier, Lynch drove us around Milford.

MR. LYNCH: Down this street, I don’t think there is a house in the past 30 years that has not had a death in the family.

ABERNETHY: Most deaths, says Lynch, are of the aged, peacefully. But too many, he adds, are random and violent. The worst are the deaths of children.

MR. LYNCH: I remember that as a younger person, I used to often shake my fist in God’s face when there was a death of a child and say, you know, “What did you have in mind here, God?”

ABERNETHY: Lynch acknowledges that the heartbreak of all that can be overwhelming.

MR. LYNCH: In a very real sense, grief is, you know, the sort of tax we pay on loving people. And you see abject, acute grief a lot.

ABERNETHY: Lynch says all that pain both tests his faith and requires it.

MR. LYNCH: Some days, you know, it seems like stating the obvious to say, you know, God loves us. Other days it seems like we are entirely alone.

ABERNETHY: On such days, I asked, what do you do?

MR. LYNCH: Pray. Yeah. That seems to work. And I don’t know if it’s the saying of it or someone at the other end hearing of it. And this is like poetry, you know. But it works.

ABERNETHY: What also works, for Lynch, is the antidote of writing: creativity that combats the depression that can accompany what some call “the dismal trade.”

Lynch’s wife, Mary, an artist, has a studio next to their house. She says dealing with death magnifies the value of life.

MARY LYNCH: When I think I am having a bad day all I have to do is look across the street and realize that somebody else has it worse.

MR. LYNCH: Well, I’m glad to be alive. You know every day you wake up is a bonus.

ABERNETHY: Lynch travels often — here, to the College of Charleston, in South Carolina — to do readings from his books. As usual, he received a glowing introduction.

MR. LYNCH: It’s always nice to hear such kind things said about you in the present tense, and to be vertical when you hear them.

ABERNETHY: Lynch read a poem about a man facing up to the fact that someday he will die. The chances of dying, Lynch likes to say, hover around 100 percent.

MR. LYNCH (reading poetry to audience): “The future thus confined to its contingencies, the present moment opens like a gift. And what to make of this? At the end, the word that comes to him is ‘Thanks. Thanks.’”

ABERNETHY: The titles of Lynch’s books disclose how much his trade influences his writing: STILL LIFE IN MILFORD; THE UNDERTAKING, a National Book Award finalist; and his latest, BODIES IN MOTION AND AT REST.

As often as he can, Lynch visits Ireland, where one of his relatives left him a cottage. He says he loves the sounds of the language there, and those sounds influence his speech and his poetry. Often, he listens to Irish radio while he writes. Lynch is much admired in Milford. He is also becoming known nationally, not only for his writing but for his opinions.

ABERNETHY: Lynch lives in the same county as Doctor Jack Kevorkian, now in prison for assisting with suicides.

MR. LYNCH: To me, assisted suicide sounds oxymoronic, you know, like “holy war.” If the only way to get rid of suffering is to get rid of the sufferer, then I say we have not looked at our other options. I see Jack Kevorkian as a serial killer.

ABERNETHY: Lynch thinks specific arrangements for funerals should be left up to the survivors. The dead, he likes to say, don’t care. On the other hand, he has written about his own wishes. Naturally, it is a poem.

MR. LYNCH (reading poetry): “I want a mess made in the snow so that the earth looks wounded, forced open, an unwilling participant. Go to the hole in the ground. Stand over it. Look into it. Wonder and be cold. But stay until it’s over, until it’s done.”

ABERNETHY: Over 30 years, Lynch has arranged perhaps 6000 funerals.

MR. LYNCH: When I see people at this most difficult time in their family history, I am also seeing what is best about our species, you know. The attachments and the affection and the faith.

ABERNETHY: Lynch was asked how he comforts the bereaved.

MR. LYNCH: What I tell people is to find ways that grief can be managed — not gotten out of but gotten through. You tell them, I can’t fix this, but I can be with you through this.

ABERNETHY: Ceremony, symbol, metaphor — they are the essence of both of Lynch’s callings: what he sometimes calls, with a smile, “the literary and mortuary arts.”

SEVERSON: One bit of advice from Tom Lynch. He says he’s learned not only that life can be short, but that if you’re angry at someone and that person dies before you’ve made up, you can suffer a lot. Lynch told me, “I don’t hold grudges very long.”

A Poem by Thomas Lynch:

Refusing at Fifty-two to Write Sonnets

It came to him that he could nearly count
How many late Aprils he had left to him
In increments of ten or, say, eleven
Thus:sixty-three, seventy-four, eighty-five.
He couldn’t see himself at ninety-six –
Humanity’s advances notwithstanding
In health-care, self-help, or new-age regimens –
What with his habits and family history,
The end he thought is nearer than you think.

The future, thereby bound to its contingencies,
The present moment opens like a gift:
The greening month, the golden week, the blue morning,
The hour’s routine, the minute’s passing glance –
All seem like godsends now. And what to make of this?
At the end the word that comes to him is Thanks.