Introduction
The critical inquiry into the field known as theopoetics is a study which
can be described as fraught with very little discoveries and findings; with very few
literary criticism that literature on the matter is so scant and almost null. Theopoetics
metaphorical analysis. Deriving the notion from its original anthropological usage, the
present writer will extend the notion of theopoetics from technique to assigning it an
ostensive identification of some forms of poems which are religious in nature. While it
appears broad and exhaustive, the notion of theopoetic works will be limited by the
present writer to poems that speak of an articulated faith, personally appropriated and
amplified in the presentation of cited poems that show this trajectory of theme. The
and thought) to the loss-of-faith theme among the selected poems. Again the selection
of poems (those that share a common theme of fideistic abandonment) will include
names in the literary world: Matthew Arnold, Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Jose Garcia
Villa, Bienvenido Lumbera, L. Lacambra Ypil and Andrew Levy. Some of the specific
be addressed in this paper, and rendered with close readings (New Critical approach)
the present author believes their works sustain a steady stream of poetic works whose
descent in the history of poetics mark distinctive traits of fideistic loss which are
undeniable, scholars take on varying approaches in assessing the form and content of
these genres. Many forms of early English poetry since the medieval period take into
account religious themes as its thrust, exploring the implications of faith for the poet
and how he sees the world. The ubiquitous presence of the sacred is felt from Bede’s
Blake’s mystical visions, Donne’s intensely spiritual connections with the deity,
Swinburne’s loss of faith. Depending on the poet and his particulate vision of the
spiritual, the theme of religiosity always found articulation in any anthology of English
In this paper, the present writer will trace the notion of fideistic abandonment
present writer will show the relationships manifested in this falling apart of the center
the poet’s death) and its relations to the shifting focus of form and spatiality of the
poetic text.
phenomenon are corollary concepts that exist not just in elitist academic sub-cultures
but as living mechanisms taking over real and material societal conditions. It is itself a
very difficult term to define since its very nature is to go up against the truth claims so
communities, and a pack of other terms that baffle anyone who believes in
epistemological certainty, the fixed nature of the human self and the progressive
power of reason to liberate and achieve stability. Many of postmodernism’s critics may
simply the latest fad in theoretical language games, but they cannot ignore the fact
that it has spawned a lot of reactions, reviews, re-alignments and restructuring with
the way human knowledge is approached. The tentacles of this monster has spread
far and wide in the university and in society as a whole. Its effects are felt in fields as
Postmodernist thinking cannot be simply relegated to this status. The fact that a
number of scholars realize it’s endemic presence and deal with it seriously is a sure
1988, 24 ; Bertens 1980, 115; Jameson 1988, 108). Many papers have been written
about the postmodern condition and its effects on culture and society. Markers of the
postmodern world have been identified from the media saturated capitalist societies
nations in the global village (Gibbins and Reimer 1999, 22). The postmodern world
view is one that looks at the totality of the experience of the cosmopolitan citizen but at
the same time shuns this totality from ever becoming an oppressive whole against
fact that it is primarily a philosophical trend and an intellectual outlook will bring forth
colossal realignments in the epistemology of the academe, for in itself the academe is
caught in an otherwise ideological way of thinking and doing its business of teaching,
sciences) were affected, how much more would be the field of literary criticism and in
particular poetics? The postmodern turn brought along with it a constellation of new
the reigning orthodoxies of their time and in their own turn were supplanted by new
The study of the principles governing what is poetry and what passes for good
poetry has been raised since Aristotle’s eponymous work Poetics. A long history of
critique and counter critique included names in the canon of literary criticism in
poetics: Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, Hugh of St. Victor, Geoffey of Vinsaulf, Dante,
Boccaccio, Sir Philip Sidney, Corneille, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, von Schiller,
William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, W.B. Yeats, R.W. Emerson, Edgar
Allan Poe, Karl Marx, Matthew Arnold, Stephen Mallarme, Ferdinand de Saussure,
Roman Jakobson, T.S. Eliot, Mikhail Bakhtin, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye, Roland
Barthes, Adrienne Rich, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Robert Frost.
The continuity of rich ideas about poetics from the ancients throughout the
medieval period through the metaphysical poets, the neoclassicists, the romantics, the
symbolists, all throughout the modern and contemporary times came about with a
richly informed understanding of the plethoric status of poetry. Numerous poets across
cultures, economics, ethnicity, Nobel prize status, religious background (or lack of),
poetry. Like any artifact of human civilization, the poem is a child of centuries of
created and re-created in this long history of coming of fulfillment. All of its constitutive
elements: rhyme, rhythm, imagery, figurative language, prosody and meaning were
formulated and reformulated depending on the spirits of the age and the demands of
the society where it found expression. The poem as a material artifact became not just
a textual product but a cultural capital of sorts, providing a sensible sign of human
development and literacy. Its function and teleology has been bitterly debated as
either an end in itself and also as a medium for political as well as artistic expression.
The poem has been transmogrified by human cultural history, as a tool for education,
an instrument for entertainment and a vehicle for that cultural need : artistic
expression.
poetics? What makes a poem postmodern by itself ? How does it differ from modern
poetry? Is the term postmodern poetics simply a catch substitute for contemporary
poetry with its undefined features, and its subversions of accepted standards and
For all its vagueness and inclusive nature, postmodernism in poetry is hard to
identify since most of the so-called traits of postmodern poetry are also found in many
modernist trends in poetry (concrete poetry, visual poetry, and conceptual poetry).
sometimes taking on shapes usually referred to by the poem (visual poetry); on other
occasions, it rearranges the letters and words to coincide with the intended effect of
the poem (concrete poetry) and in other instances it follows unorthodox format from
skipping of lines, to allotment of few words in one line while it enjambs on another
accepted forms, techniques, language use, and others. This is very reminiscent of the
binaries presented by Ihab Hassan in his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus. The
work compares modernism and postmodernism. The very same list may apply to the
1997, 118)
Postmodernism in Poetics
poetries (C. John Holcombe 2007, 1-2). First, is the presence of iconoclasm. Similar to
the accepted norms of poetic composition mainly through parody, irony and pastiche.
rhymes, meter, and even linear allotment of words. Enjambments are also radically
stretched way out of proportion to create intended effects of subversion and at the
reference other than themselves. In a way this is an anticipation of the arbitrary nature
of the sign and signifier representation. Baudrillard famously declared that the world is
nothing but an allocation of inter-references to media like images, all pointing to
nothing but the hyper-real images. In postmodern poetry, images are flat and media-
like. The referential nature of language is anesthesized in postmodern verse (if in case
there is still a postmodern verse). The act of representation through verse is seen as
tossed to other referents in the text, thus resulting in the indeterminacy of meaning.
One could also deduce from this that meaning in post modern poetry is never
actualized nor finalized. The sheer act of inter-referentiality is the name of the game.
Third, a Protean penchant for formlessness. In this respect poems written in the
postmodern trajectory show restlessness in the sense that they repudiate modernist
tendencies for organic form and harmony. With its denial of the need for a structured
form, postmodern affinity for shapelessness is expressed in the bursting of texts and
textual components (words, phrases, lines) into collages and montages; usually
them altogether so as to create an effect of distance between the reader and the text.
literate and elitist language, avoiding serious and responsible representations and
stretching the playful and the arbitrary. The populist strain in postmodern poems
accepts themes and categories from across a wide spectrum of the social strata in a
way democratizing the content and experiences of the subaltern referents in literary
representation.
All the aforementioned identities for the postmodern poem hail from the idea
establishes the non-locality of the poet as a constructor of reality through his art. The
poet is as much a fluid postmodern self, one who is indeterminate and who is actively
dislike for fixed meanings and institutions is rooted in the perception that the
postmodern poet is engaged in the act of meaning construction and that this process
is the end itself. The goal is not to come up with valid interpretations or pin down the
author’s intention. The employment of parody, pastiche and irony are tools that
highlight the very nature of the postmodern project: engagement in poetry without
being grounded by the project itself. This apparent paradox is the heart of any
discourse. With Barthes’ announcement of the author’s death, the reader’s birth is
stressed. Meaning isn’t the main goal, but the act of textual engagement often
highlighted by the reader’s act of perusal of the text. Often the very presentation of
textual components (words, phrases and line distribution including indention and
spatial distances between words) in a postmodern poem follow the lead of abdicating
meaning and compelling the reader to sustain the playful communion with the text’s
indeterminacy. (Kaladjian 2005, 285).The unique way in which words are presented
on page form is part of the distinction of postmodern poetry. As also seen in modernist
experimental and avant-garde poetry, the configurations of poetic form (as in visual
poetry-where poems like George Herbert’s Easter Wings and John Hollander’s Swan
and Shadow visually picture what their contents represent). They may form part of the
of letters (as in the Futurist poetry) and lines (diagonal, inverted, sagging in a
horizontal direction etc.) as distinctive of the concrete poetry movement of the 1950s.
Another example is Jessica Smith’s Manifest which deliberately violates the traditional
presentation of the poem in predictable stanzas and presents the poem in an outline
form, with each entry statement forming the verse. The poem is complete with
indentions and numerical markers like in a real outline of a text. With these
tendencies, the over all structural representation of poetry is done through oblique re-
arrangement of stanzas, lines and enjambments, and in some instances the use of
even the method in which poetry is composed (as in the Dadaist technique of cutting
newspapers and pulling out the texts formed out of such random method and
determinate proclivity on the part of the poet. With resources and a history of ideas at
his fingertips, the postmodern poet is teased to shake traditional forms, contents,
methodologies and even language. Thus, is born the landscape of the modern and
Although the direction postmodern poetics has taken in recent times has always
baffled poets and critics due to its unpredictability and non-uniformity, the future for
poetry is ridiculously open- to forms, language use, imagery, and prosody (or lack
thereof). Open is the operational term here, as the non-closure of its situation is
postmodernist forms ( Conte 1991, 6). The two-pronged system he used involved an
yet least known poets in English both found in the Anglo-American terrain of poetics:
procedural and series forms of poetry. A thorough and exhaustive attention has been
given by Conte to these two forms of postmodern poetry, and by extension his
considerations, pagination, textual inversion, letter size and positioning of texts etc.
their legacy of pushing forth a never-ending critique of the poetics of the 20 th century.
It is this modernist poetics that the postmodern was fully conceived and given birth to
(Draper 1999, 13). Eliot’s prophecy of the breakdown of the Center applied as well to
poetics as it was uttered in the self declarations of many poetic discourse movements
within the modernist umbrella (Dadaist, surrealist, Black, Futurist, avant-garde, etc.) In
terms of such openness and self declarations of variant poetic discourses came the
radical explosion of many sensibilities and approaches of doing poetry in the
postmodern age. Naturally this is a reflection of the postmodern mindset with its
earlier of poetic forms and methods), an experimentation with various media and
global issues like environment, religious diversity and ethnicity. With such strong
decentralization from the traditional notions of truth, reason and absolutism, religious
poetry followed suit and became sensitive to issues of doubt, restructuring of faith and
modernist streams relentlessly battered the fixed claims of faith. With John Donne,
Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Milton, religious poetry was sensitive and reverent
but with the advent of the modernist (and postmodernist) poet, poetry was the medium
idea of theopoetic subversion as it clearly articulates the faith (or its gradual ebbing) of
the modern age. Arnold heralds an age which is characterized by loneliness and slow
dilapidation. Reflective of the spirit of the times, Arnold comes up with a poem that
succinctly captures the angst and sorrows of his age. Formally, the poem consists of
four stanzas with differing number of lines per stanza (14, 6, 8 and 9)- an indication of
the beginnings of the modernist impulse to experiment with lines and stanzas. There is
no predictable verse pattern although the poem resonates with signs of free handling
of iambic pattern.
“Dover Beach” is a keen view of a natural scenario- the sea and its shores, both
English and French coasts. In the imagery of the sea, the world is portrayed as
peaceful, “the sea is calm tonight”; “the tide is full/the moon lies fair”. Although a placid
picture is painted, there is more than meets the eye. The speaker refers to the
glimmering of light and its disappearance. Light maybe be taken here as hope and
strength. It seems Arnold suggests that the “moon blanched coast” of the world is a
temporary illusion of tranquility and that beneath this tranquility is the “grating roar of
pebbles”. The shift from the light bathed coasts and its suggestion of temporal lighting
speaks of a similar ephemerality of hope and certitude as in a later line, its values are
questioned:
The last few lines closes in on the poem rapidly shifting the focus from the calm
and “tremulous cadence” of life’s vicissitudes (as embodied in the sea’s tranquil
versification and rhythmic pattern per line reinforces the very meaning of the poem: its
reference to a world devoid of meaning and purpose. It was a world ravished by new
ways of thinking, where old faiths and religions are questioned, doubted and
eventually abandoned. “The Sea of Faith, was once too, at the full and round earth’s
shore.” This speaks of the consequent rejection of certitude in the claims of religious
persons. It seems to imply that religion cannot hold anymore for the “modern world”
with its new companions of reason, technology and science. Faith has been relegated
to the dustbin of private belief if not superstition. Arnold acknowledges that this Sea of
Faith once had a grip on people but now is being abandoned in favor of newer gods.
Arnold’s “Dover Beach” ends with a dismal tone of closure as the persona in the poem
clings on to the security of relationships and the will-driven act to love and make
meaning out of the world’s uncertainty. For in this human attempt will meaning and
fixity will be found to avoid the irregular ebbs and flows of life’s seasons.
The question and value of church going is beautifully addressed by this poem
of Philip Larkin. Although simple and direct to the point, Larkin raises the toll on the
cultural activity of religiosity and its most concrete inflection in the Anglo-American
as either being a dull habit or an acute fever. This profoundly captures the cultural
“Church Going” is written in seven unrhymed stanzas of 8 lines each, the meter
for every line varies from nine to eleven syllables although on the average the lines
are written in pentameter. The syntax is inverted and at times overtly so to stress a
prosaic narrative of the poem. “Move forward, run my hand around the font.”
With its almost prosaic and casual tone, Larkin’s project seems to be to
express wonder and ruminate on the idea of church going. “Wondering what to look
for; wondering, too/ When churches fall completely out of use/ What we shall turn
them into?” The questions are of course raised in the atmosphere of innocent inquiry
and on the observation that churches have become museums or cultural artifacts of a
specific epistemology: faith. Larkin sustains his ponderings on the next few stanzas
thinking on how religious practice is passed on as belief, and how it appeals to some
although a greater number has forsaken it. His litany of “what ifs” and wonders dwell
on assuming that others like the persona may have felt the same way too- about
religion’s apparent lack of use in the modern age. A reduction of faith and belief takes
place ultimately once “ superstition, like belief, must die”. He goes further by delivering
the final blow for faith: “and what remains when disbelief has gone?/ Grass, weedy
after stripping faith of its transcendental powers, the visiting persona in the church
sacred associations. Here the persona removes the connotative association of the
While admitting the ignorance of such a structure’s worth, the persona betrays
a numbing sense of relevance in the mere act of church visit. He seems to see religion
as serving some purpose, although the ambivalence is shattered at the end of the
poem:
Ted Hughes”Theology”
Ted Hughes is renowned British poet both by his works and by his association
with another poet- the American Sylvia Plath. Much of his poetic corpus are replete
and Hughes’ utility of trickster figures (like those of animal trickster gods from other
prosaic postmodern form shows a new approach to the story. Brazenly, the persona
A novel way of reading the biblical account brings a new and possibly enriched
perspective, one that under the old ways of biblical hermeneutic would appear
heterodox but characteristic of the Zeitgeist of the modernist sensibility, traditions and
orthodoxies of narratives are playfully challenged and in which a humorous account is
certain perspective on the theme being discussed. Aside from the destabilizing
attempt of the hallowed biblical account, the “dark intestine” of the account is a
In this account, the privileging of the traditional antagonistic nature of the serpent’s
role is raised to that of a humorous apathy to God. The God of Ted Hughes’
“Theology” seems impotent and the serpent seems to have been the character who
got away with his cunning and craftiness. Here again, the postmodern technique of
times.
Jose Garcia Villa is perhaps the most famous Filipino poet who writes in
English. Known for his originality, through experimental forms (marker of postmodern
subversion of structures) such as his reversed consonance and comma poems, Villa
wrote voluminously and some of his lyrics are impelled by visions of theological
significance. Although the deity who appears in his works seem more like the deity of
process theologians, Villa nonetheless reveals his poetry with streaks of the divine
and the human. The theme of some of his poems involve the relationship of man with
the divinity.
In his “God Said I Made a Man” (number 49 of his Have Come, Am Here
poems), a Promethean man rears its head against the Divine. The divine in this poem
appears less omnipotent than His own creation: Man as alluded to in the line, “God
said I made a man/ Out of clay- But so bright he, he spun/ Himself to brightest day.” In
this line, the reader sees Villa’s Man as omnipotent perhaps greater than His Maker.
The lyric is a poetical fable of man’s origins, one that traces the element of the divine
in man. Here, Villa crowns Man as creation and yet his creature-like status does not
limit him. This man, was “even lovely to behold”- a metaphysic that digs deeply into
the binary of Creator-creation, and although the privileged position of the divine is
stated categorically, an observant reader will see that the truly privileged in this work
by Villa is the Creature who ascends god-like status in his attempt to “aim his bow at
his creator”.Villa provides the man character of his genius by proceeding to human
according to Villa’s vision is a creature of genius- one who measures his Maker, one
who exercises his will and one who if needed may slay his God. The subversive in this
work is explicit in that God as a notion will not be excused from the probe of Man, from
the “measuring” task man has apportioned to himself. The sacred and the profane do
not know any boundary, as far as man’s seeking of the truth is involved.
theme of Bien Lumbera’s “The Leaden Christ”. With references to the artistic task of
evoking faith, the poem is an attempt to present the conflicting vision and the failure of
cultural modes of production to evoke the subjective realities of faith. The conflict
arises because of the dystonic nature of the subject’s perception: “As art, the object no
longer told/ the truth, but it was saved somehow/ by guilt I would not want to own:
without a thought of art or faith, I nailed it to the nearest wall.” The persistent tendency
afoul in the face of the subject’s desensitization to the repetitive nature of religious
genuflection towards the crucifix (as an object that’s supposed to elicit the religious
(play of light plagued the perceiver of the detached arm of the crucifix, obliquely
producing a sense of horrific blasphemy) Although the intended effect of the crucifix’s
material (lead) disguises its real purpose, the other material accidents reinforce the
desired effect: “The sight appalls/ the mind at times when trick of light/ animates the
pain that lead denies”. The flat and direct description seems stolid but its prosaic
nature does not refuse the poem its intended effect. Here Lumbera presents a fleeting
scene and at the same time “defines the margins of our art and lies.” The attempt of
the religious poet is always replete by limits (epistemological grasp of the numinous,
the psyche of the believer). All of these present barriers and sustains “hypocrisy” on
the side of the believing poet. The task of the poet is to be authentic to the realities of
these reductions of his faith, these limitations which at some point may nullify his faith.
Lumbera presents a slice of the task a poet must pursue and with this realization must
see the failure of his “way of knowing” as possibly constricted by conditions beyond
his control.
Ypil’s poem “At The Village Chapel” is about waiting, one that creates the
impression that the wait will never be appeased nor ended. In seven stanzas of varied
line assignments, the poem follows the flexibility and fluidity of verse characteristic of
the Philippine poetry in English in the late 80s. With references to moon-moths,
geckos, lizards, slugs and townspeople, the poem locates the fixation of the persona
with the mundane while at the same time setting the pursuit of reverie in a supposedly
sacral place- the village chapel. This treatment of the chapel as a place for waiting and
the sacredness of the chapel, and its implosion with the mundane concerns of the
sensibilities of faith among the rustic country folk to their immediate concerns (the
harvest, the play of the children, the setting up of guards). In fact all through out the
(moth, termites, ants, centipedes) and other minute creatures (worms, gecko, lizard).
The sense that the persona creates in the poem is to bring the addressee to the
details of rustic life (lit lanterns, wheat heavy for reaping, divided the wine). It seems
that the whole point of the poem is the voyeurism on the dead lizard and the moon-
moth’s departure- themes hardy spiritual in nature but the fact that the village chapel
becomes the venue for this collective voyeurism not only of the persona but even the
townspeople.( “One by one we eventually took leave, called the children back). The
persistence of the creatures’ life (“There was only the growing termite hill./ The sigh of
worms in the loam./The centipedes on the road”.) With this background, the persona
seems to belittle the sacredness of the chapel, at least hinting that its purpose has
Rudolf Otto’s work The Idea of the Holy is a significant work on religious
work, religious experience in its collective form was dubbed with the modifier
impossible. In his poetry Andrew Levy extracts language and moves beyond its limit
by directly representing its own inability to articulate. In a poem that exactly copies the
very nature of a meaning he wishes to convey, Levy brings to the uninitiated crossed
eyebrows, or pouting faces, effects more tangibly read than his very medium itself-
poetry. In his poem (truly postmodern in its form, content and technique) “Ineffable
The attempt to place words and phrases regardless of syntax and meaning formation
demonstrate the shifting and unsteady foothold language has on texts and by
randomly but by his philosophy of language, one that focuses on the “curves” of
language. This meant the “cut and paste” method of apparently real images and
comprehension (or incomprehension), suggesting the idea that such a notion as faith
another”, “sternutatory free from denticulated plastic” and “I wrestled with intelligence”.
All these present a face of the experience itself, although put forth in a way as if they
were stirring images from someone’s mind, devoid of coherence but nonetheless
really present within the experiencing subject. This plethora of seemingly irrelevant
language “units” are ever present for the reader although the reader himself is
of words and syntax, in which Levy challenges readers to follow with a sustained
reading, although of course any attempt to impose meaning upon Levy’s “Ineffable
Faith” is an exercise in futility. However patterns emerge out of this work. For one it is
the presence of a smooth and steady flow of lines, albeit the beginning lines were
written in small letters, perhaps to stress the apparent coequality of randomness of the
words. Language thus reaches its limit in Levy’s attempt of articulation, both in its
imposed limit and its essentially limited given-ness as a human artifact. References to
such is replete in the poem itself (“a land of maple linearity”; “senses leisure pluck
images and the relentless destabilizing of syntax and sense are all the sublimates of
this ineffable faith. The subversion of faith is the subversion of language in this Levy
irreverent mixture of sensical and non-sensical ideas (“conciliatory burrito kill some of
‘em”; “happy thoughts of wine curtailed scent imparts” and “bent this fool play fuckers
of solitary bed”). Postmodern poetry has reached, metaphorically seaking has reached
its ultimately blasphemy in the articulation of the inarticulate, in the tracing of the
curves and linearity of language, in the death and resurrection of sense and non-
sense. What has been travestied is the god of stability, of coherence and of order.
This, one may say is the final act of subversion of the text and the reader.
Concluding Postcript
Theopoetic subversion is a recurrent theme in the history of poetry. There are
sustained examples of this tendency as they are inflected in the variant movements
that ultimately led to the postmodern landscape which dramatically transformed the
poetics of the present age. The routes of subversion not only dethroned the divinity,
but destabilized as well all His attendant deities of order, harmony, tradition,
convention, fixed forms, coherence and staticism. From questions of faith to questions
of canonical poetics the direction of this relentless interrogation led to the parallel lines
of language questioning and at the same time questioning the contents and contours
of faith (in a higher power, in reason, in conventions). The movement towards the
metaphysical level the role of the deity in the very contents of the faith communities of
the poets. Thus, the shift in structure is also a shift in the object of worship. It now
appears as an impasse but nonetheless, the openness of the future of poetics is still
an exciting page upon which a post-postmodernist poetics can address and explicate.
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