Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible, 2 vols.

CHAPTERS INTO VERSE

Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible

Assembled and Edited by Robert Atwan and Laurance Wieder

Vol 1: Genesis to Malachi, Oxford University Press, $25,481 pp.

Vol. 2: Gospels to Revelation, Oxford University Press, $25, 391 pp.

Imagine that you are to be confined indefinitely--perhaps for life--and you may take one book along. What will it be? Shakespeare? The Bible? I love to play this game and have refined it with some additional guidelines. No fair: anything on CD ROM. There is only one electrical outlet in your cell and the three-pronged plug of your computer will not fit. Magazine subscriptions and multivolume series are likewise forbidden (Sorry, Commonweal readers.) However, you may select a multivolume set that bears a single title, such as The Works of John Ruskin, or The Oxford English Dictionary. Choose carefully! Playing this game inevitably leads me to the same impasse: the Bible or poetry? For a long while I have contented myself with the answer, The Works of John Milton. Milton covers the biblical territory, give or take a few heresies, and the verse wouldn't wear thin quickly. But a nagging voice in the back of my head whispers, "What about lyric poetry?" Oh dear, I would miss it! How many poems can I commit to memory before they take me away?

Robert Atwan's and Laurance Wieder's magnificent two-volume anthology, Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible is the perfect book for my imaginary solitary confinement. Astonishingly, no one has collected poems inspired by the Bible before, although hymns, carols, religious verse, and mystical poetry have been amply anthologized. Of course, English poetry from the Middle Ages has often engaged itself with Scripture, with theology, and the spiritual life; there is a sense in which any good historical anthology illustrates poetry's relationship to the Bible. Yet the multipurpose notes of college texts such as The Norton Anthology in effect put biographical and historical details, explanations of Greek and Roman mythology, literary allusions, and scriptural references all on the same level. These brief notes cannot distinguish among allusions, paraphrases, arguments with, and imaginative retellings of Scripture; even now, editors assume a greater familiarity with the Bible than most college-age readers possess. Instructed to get a copy of the King James Bible, many students of English poetry fail to read it; why should they, when it is treated as a reference book? Chapters into Verse eloquently demonstrates the importance of Scripture as a source text for poets and more effectively recommends the Bible as a vital, stimulating book in itself than any other recent work I know.

Chapters into Verse accomplishes this feat by quoting liberally from the Bible, in anticipation of the poems that follow. There is no need to flip back and forth between text and appendix; a reader can begin at the beginning, when "God created the heaven and the earth," and read through two volumes, in order, to poems based on verses from Revelation. The selections are generous, comparable to the excerpts employed in the liturgy, and they are printed in a handsome boldface that sets them off from the poems that follow. Atwan and Wieder imagine that readers will want to refer to the Bible for more, but they have constructed their collection so sensibly that it can stand alone. Volume 1: Genesis to Malachi, corresponds to the Hebrew Bible and Volume 2: Gospels to Revelation to the New Testament; and they do differ. The editors write that "the poetry of the New Testament is largely lyrical and meditative, verse that seems better suited to the more inward and private response encouraged by the spiritual quest of Jesus. The Old Testament, on the other hand, invites a more public, less personal and introspective, poetry." That the Hebrew Bible contains a great deal more verse than the mainly prose New Testament also affects poets' reactions to their source texts. The most significant difference between the two parts lies in the editors' decision to "harmonize" the four Gospel accounts, rather than presenting poems based on Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in subsequent sections. Readers choosing one volume or the other for purchase will do well to flip a coin!

That Atwan and Wieder not only "edit," but "assemble" this collection is by far the most impressive quality of Chapters into Verse. Of course, Blake, Herbert, Milton, Dickinson, Hopkins, and a host of familiar seventeenth-century poets provide the bulk of the poems. Yet the editors have endeavored to include many twentieth-century poets, as well. We expect to find Auden (and we do), but we also discover John Ashbery, Countee Cullen, Geoffrey Hill, Laura Riding Jackson, Denise Levertov, Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and Eleanor Wilner. The presence of the modernist poets, including poets of the Harlem Renaissance, and a very broad range of contemporary poets, many of them women, makes obvious the fact that twentieth-century poets have not abandoned the Bible. Since the poems were tested to meet two criteria, "real literary merit" and derivation from a specific scriptural source, the reader never senses that a poem has been included because its maker belongs to a particular race, creed, or ethnicity. That Chapters into Verse presents the work of Jewish poets; Christian poets; agnostic poets; women and men; representatives of many centuries and several continents emphasizes the diversity of voices who have been stimulated to utterance by the words of Holy Writ. One of the real pleasures of reading these volumes comes from the juxtapositions of voices, forms, and attitudes, as when Li-Young Lee's response to the Song of Solomon follows Edward Taylor's. Over three hundred years separate these two American poets, but they join in poetic conversation. (The index of poets helpfully provides the poets' dates.) Readers of the poetry that appears in every issue in Commonweal will be pleased to discover one of Anne Porter's poems, "Oaks and Squirrels," in the selection of poems based on Genesis.

In evaluating a treasure-trove such as Chapters into Verse, I find it impossible to single out a particular poem for praise, although many poems struck me as candidates for a catalogue of excellence. The hundred (or so) pages in volume 1 that include poems based on Job, the Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon gave me more pleasure than almost any single volume of poetry I have read this year. Another reader might single out the pages in volume 2, where poems based on the Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles rival my choice. Beautifully made, with prints by William Blake on the dust-jackets; considerately edited to make older verse accessible through modernization; judiciously filled but not overstuffed with excellent poetry, Chapters into Verse is everything that an anthology ought to be. It will sustain many hours of pleasurable reading and reflection.