Blowing Clover, Falling Rain
A Theological Commentary on the Poetic Canon of the American Religion
Foreword by Malcolm Guite
Imprint: Pickwick Publications
The field of theopoetics explores the ways in which we "make God" (present)--particularly through language. This book explores questions of theopoetics as they relate to the central poetry of the American Sublime. It offers a fresh, theological engagement with what literary critic Harold Bloom terms the American religion (transcendentalism: Emerson's homespun mysticism). Specifically, it seeks to rehabilitate Emerson's concept of self-reliance from the charge of gross egoism, by situating it in the context of normative mysticisms Eastern and Western. It undertakes a more poetic approach to reading theologically-inflected poetry, by exegeting four poets collectively constituting Bloom's American religious "canon": Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. It utilizes a modified version of the ancient fourfold allegorical mode of reading Scripture, to draw out theological dimensions of four quintessential texts (Nature, "Song of Myself," "Sunday Morning," "Lachrymae Christi"), in order to offer a more imaginative way of reading imaginative writing. Building on Emerson's contention, "just as there is creative writing, there is creative reading," and Bloom's claim, "a theory of poetry . . . must be poetry, before it can be of any use in interpreting poems," it demonstrates the unique, viable ways in which poems are able to "do" theology--and perform or embody theopoetic truths.
Travis Helms serves as priest to the Episcopal Student Center at the University of Texas. He is also the founder and curator of LOGOS Poetry Collective, a liturgically-inflected reading series that congregates in east Austin. His poetry and essays have appeared in a number of journals, including Book 2.0, North America Review, New Haven Review, and Noesis. He was the inaugural William W. Cook Frost Place Fellow, and winner of the Arthur Sale Poetry Prize.
“A finely written and deeply perceptive examination of the roots and resonances of the transcendentalist tradition in American literature, this book makes a strong case for a quite fresh reading of this tradition in the light of the wider religious traditions of East and West, and with a keen ear for echoes of some surprisingly central theological themes. It is a rich and original essay by a writer with a keen poetic sensibility.”
—Rowan Williams, Master of Magdalene College, University of Cambridge
“As erudite as it is eloquent, Travis Helms’ book offers a first-rate treatment of American poetry and religion, and of the tradition of American religious poetry. Rooted in the complexities of literary canonicity and criticism, Helms’ illuminating treatment of four of the founding poets of the ‘American Sublime’ reminds us of the abiding importance of the religious to the American literary imagination. . . . Scholars of American poetry and literary history, as well as those working at the intersection of literature and religion, and theopoetics, will find this book a significant contribution to their fields of study.”
—David C. Mahan, Executive Director, Rivendell Center for Theology and the Arts, Yale University, and Lecturer in Religion and Literature, Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Yale Divinity School
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