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The article presents revised versions of papers presented at the International Milton Symposium that convened in Toronto, Ontario in July 2023 with the panel entitled "Is Paradise Lost a Christian Poem," organized by Richard Strier. Topics discussed include Milton's supposed championship of orthodox Christianity in "Paradise Lost" and how Milton's last poems correlate with Christianity and religion more broadly.

This paper contributes to the reassessment of the role of Lucretius' De rerum natura and Epicurean philosophy in early Christian writings by conducting a close study of Carmen 23 composed by the poet Paulinus of Nola. While previous scholarship has examined classical influences on Paulinus' poetry, especially from Vergil, no existing study has attended to Paulinus' incorporation of Epicurean elements. This paper argues that in Carmen 23 Paulinus incorporates Epicurean doctrines and Lucretius' poetic imagery to appeal to an audience familiar with Epicurean ideas. Through the creative fusion of Epicurean physics with Christian metaphysics, Paulinus conjures up a poetic world in which the natural and spiritual realms constantly interact. While using Lucretian imagery to direct his audience's gaze toward the natural world, Paulinus nevertheless reveals a higher reality in which the invisible operation of God's spirit governs and perfects the mechanism of nature. In thus stretching his poetic imagination to encompass the working of nature and spirit, Paulinus invents a new eclectic literary form and a kind of physiological miracle account that blends naturalism and mysticism. As such, Carmen 23 attests to Paulinus' literary achievement in repurposing a classic of Epicurean philosophy and Latin poetry for Christian panegyric and hagiography. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Theopoetics" is a term that refers loosely to the aesthetic theories and poetics of using poetry to regain participatory access to the divine. Though the exact definition of theopoetics is somewhat contested, there seems to be overall agreement within the field defined by the term that it has something to do with recovering the experience of the presence of God as a poetic complement to theological rigor. What remains elusive, however, is a practical definition of theopoetical poetry: how would we recognize a theopoetical poem when we saw one? This article moves toward clarity on all three of these questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How might a Christian poetics of care open up new ground for formations of Christianity more attuned to material care for others, including nonhuman animals and the world? I argue that the openness afforded by a Christian poesis , where one is free to form various ways of being Christian through the aesthetic acts of unmaking, remaking, and making, unbeholden to a narrow presumption of authorized "truth," offers the chance to create variations of and on the Christian, variations that should be finally evaluated by the care they create in and for the world. Because some parts of the Christian past and some parts of the profession of literary studies have been and continue to be so careless, I suggest that such a Christian poetics might help shift Christianity and literary studies into more caring forms of being in the world and the academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article tries to draw this forum together in three ways. First, a Christian poetics has to do with hermeneutics, informed by a long tradition of biblical interpretation. Second, a Christian poetics takes up the discipline of wonder, which remains crucial to the scholarly work of research and teaching. Finally, a Christian poetics combines a sense of wonder with an emphasis on care. It asks how awe and action relate, seeking to understand the many ways texts not just transcend this world, but also transform it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A unique consultation took place in May 2021 that assembled literary scholars and theologians from across the U.S. and U.K. to reconsider the shape of a Christian poetics for the 21st century. This introduction highlights the goals and insights that arose from our three-day session, and then considers how the vision of Wendell Berry sheds light on our calling as scholars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay approaches the topic of Christian poetics via a postcritical reading of the figure of Father Brown. I look to Chesterton's literary creation as an opportunity for thinking about Christian charity and its importance for the way in which literary critics practice critique. Along the way, the essay explores the meaning of the postcritical, plays with the conventions of the detective genre, and focuses on some of the recent contributions to the so-called method wars by scholars such as Bruce Robbins and Rita Felski. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The miscell offers the explanation for a verse that has always been misunderstood: Prud. perist. 10.845. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius' classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius' Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We persistently fail to appreciate the very status of cancionero poetry as an innovative art form, as literature worthy of serious analysis, and as an intellectual and humanistic pursuit. The villancico 'Por una gentil floresta', attributed to both the Marqués de Santillana and Suero de Ribera, is a case in point, a composition that is very well known but grossly underappreciated as a work of art, a cultural commentary, or for its social significance. It exists in multiple incarnations, in both the manuscript and early printed traditions of the cancioneros, attesting to its ample circulation and popularity. While the object of intense philological enquiry regarding issues of authorship, transmission, and possible influence, the numerous studies dedicated to this villancico do not foreclose further discussion of it to achieve greater appreciation of its artistic and human complexity. Close reading illustrates the abundant literary, thematic and cultural possibilities it offers, and allows us to articulate the wealth, intricacy, human understanding and artistic significance of fifteenth-century Castilian courtly verse; possibilities that reach well beyond philology and textual criticism and prove it a rich source for fruitful interpretation that exemplifies the kind of poetry and hermeneutical potential that can be found in the cancioneros. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gregory of Nazianzus' Carmen 2,1,39 (εἰς τὰ ἔμμετρα) has generally been regarded as a sort of manifesto of Gregory's poetry. Scholars have mostly concentrated on the programmatic core of the poem, but the iambic tirade of the closing part deserves attention as well. A thorough analysis of this text should start from a preliminary survey of its manuscript tradition, which points out the need of a critical edition, since the aged PG edition still relies on a few witnesses. Furthermore, this leads to the assumption that two different addressees are involved in the poem: the former is a fictitious one, whereas the second is Gregory's sworn enemy, Maximus the Cynic. Thus, the iambic tirade which closes poem 2,1,39 should be set within the context of the Maximus affair. Such an identification affects the dating of the poem, too. Since the Maximus affair took place in summer 380, but on the other hand Gregory seems also to allude to the Council of Constantinople, which opened in 381, it may be concluded that the poem was composed in two phases and that the poetical program exposed is due to the re-working of an older satirical draft against Maximus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay contends that the poetry of Jones Very, often considered predominately "mystical," was deeply engaged in political debates of the era. Not only did Very often write poems with an avowedly public purpose, but his seemingly otherworldly, spiritual sonnets sometimes participated in antebellum political debates. The sonnet "The Hand and Foot" (1839), for instance, describes a mode of Christian passivity and quietism that echoes the contemporaneous call for passive "non-resistance" to slavery found in William Lloyd Garrison's 1838 "Declaration of Sentiments," the foundational statement of the New England Non-Resistance Society. Very's poem also describes a mode of Christian behavior that is radically disruptive of social conformity, a kind of embodied "prayer" that may have influenced Henry David Thoreau's more famous manifesto of passive resistance, "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849). Thoreau witnessed Very's passive but disruptive behavior on more than one occasion in Concord, Massachusetts, well before his own unique dramatization of nonconformity in the mid 1840s. Comparing Very's erasure of individual will to Thoreau's more canny deployment of passivity can help us clarify antebellum modes of passive engagement as they evolved toward the eventual violence of John Brown's raid and the American Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Prudentius, the bodily resurrection becomes a figure for poetic immortality. Just as the author believes that his God will one day raise him from the dead, he expects and invokes a Christian reader to authenticate and authorise the fragile verbal records of a poetry that is insistently human and fallen. In other words, Prudentius' metapoetics are perfectly in sync with his theology. After (I) presenting Prudentius' transformation at the end of his Praefatio and setting out the terms and scope of the argument, this article (II) shows how the author puts himself at the mercy of his readers and patrons in the Peristefanon poems and then (III) considers the body and the resurrection in the Liber Cathemerinon. A short section (IV) on fictionality and belief opens up the argument, and a conclusion (V) advances it through a reading of the end of De opusculis suis. This metapoetic reading of Prudentius reveals that the author's hopes for an afterlife are expressed in and through the creative imagining of poetic and fictional scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the inclusion of Christian poetry in American samplers. He mentions the Calvinist and Moralist religious traditions the influenced the chosen poetry, the opening of U.S. religion to focus more on virtue after the dominance of Calvinism, and the use of such poetry to signify a household's choice.

Late Antique Christian poets preserved the epithet tonans (thundering), one of the many descriptive terms for Jupiter, and applied it to the Christian god as a means of proclaiming his supremacy. As this poetic tradition continued into the Middle Ages, tonans and its derivatives appeared in new contexts, with the Jovian epithet and other storm-related imagery appearing in ritual environments and on precious objects. Although the classical origins and subversive connotations of the epithet receded from view, its ability to evoke lightning, thunder, and other celestial manifestations meant that it could intensify the multisensory experiences of readers and viewers. This is particularly clear when written references to the Thunderer are paired with other classical allusions, with descriptions of powerful voices and miraculous weather phenomena, or with comparisons of material brilliance and spiritual illumination. Many of these same references were designed to help audiences recall the scriptural accounts of God's celestial throne or the Ark of the Covenant revealed in Heaven. Creative uses of tempestuous symbolism also allowed artists and authors to emphasize connections among biblical motifs and to imbue text and image with apocalyptic overtones. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A large portion of the Syriac works attributed to Ephrem of Nisibis survives in the form of collected poetic anthologies. This paper argues that previous attempts to assign authorship and date of composition to Ephrem's hymn cycles mistakenly treat these works as if they were treatises written by Ephrem. Scholars have tended to treat the hymn cycles as units and to judge the authenticity of each cycle as a whole. By contrast, this paper contends that the cycles postdate Ephrem and were assembled and supplemented by later editors. It further proposes that the heterogeneous origin of most of the hymn cycles makes it impossible to date them to a particular time in Ephrem's career. To hypothesize a date of composition is to assume that Ephrem composed the hymns in that cycle at a particular time and collected them as a unit. Likewise, this paper contends that scholars must be frank about the general lack of historical evidence, which severely challenges our ability to contextualize fourth-century Syriac poetry. The paper concludes by proposing a new approach to questions related to authorship and date of composition, one focused on smaller metrical sub-units (meter-melodies) that comprise the large hymn cycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how the "Lectio Divina" or sacred reading became a stimulus for the early poetry of Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk, Catholic writer and theologian, on Biblical narratives. Topics covered include Merton's approach to selecting Biblical passages, how Merton's practice of "Lectio" has informed his art and the impact of his poetry on readers.

This essay offers an introduction to the poetry of Peter Scupham. Through close readings of individual poems, I demonstrate the beauty and formal accomplishment of his work, and I argue that his poetry embodies his sense of a living Christian tradition, one that also inheres in the English landscape. I further argue that this tradition connects the dead to the living, and the remote in time tomore recent English history. The particular Christian ethos of Scupham's poetry is one in which tradition, order, design, meaning, and essence are paramount. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay I examine the implicit paradox that, although in conventional consideration 'light' is good and 'darkness', by antithesis, bad, the antithesis itself implies interconnection and, especially in poetry, the evocation of light can equally imply the possibility of darkness. Further, I suggest that poets have found intermediate or qualified illumination to be a more productive resource than light unmoderated by shadow, whose erasure of uncertainty is potentially disabling. My principal examples are drawn from modern poetry, in W. H. Auden, Wallace Stevens and T. S. Eliot, preceded by a consideration of some nineteenth-century precursors; by means of these I show how their verse takes animation from the transient and transitional aspects of light, rather than from its plenitude. The implications of this, in a culture shaped by traditional Christian associations between 'God' and 'light', are suggestive throughout the essay, but become especially resonant in the case of Eliot's overtly Christian poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The poem from the Bodmer Papyrus (PBodmer 30) To Abraham contains a number of perplexing phrases and images--one in particular is the ambiguous word pjXov, which appears in no other known text on the Sacrifice of Isaac. In this poem Abraham, in place of his son Isaac, chooses the pvjXov. I contribute to our understanding of how the poem works by demonstrating what p)Xov signifies in this context. I argue that the poem deliberately uses the ambiguous word pv)Aov precisely because it can mean both sheep and apple. Moreover, when the apple is understood in the context of patristic interpretations of Song of Songs 2:3 (one of the few places pfjXov appears in the Septuagint), it becomes clear that the apple that Abraham chooses in place of his son points typologically to Christ and the meal Abraham prepares anticipates the Eucharist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the importance of a visionary experience that Amy Clampitt had while visiting the Cloisters in New York City in 1956. Immediately afterwards, Clampitt began writing poetry for the first time, and her letters describing the experience evoke what is most distinctive about her later work: wonder before the world’s richness; an embrace of temporality and flux; the understanding that perception is the surest route to mystery. Clampitt remained an incarnational poet even after she left the church, committed to the claim that, as she put it, “whatever we know of incorporeal reality is to date inseparable from the channels that received it.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a noteworthy difference between Alan Jacobs’s interpretation of Auden’s oratorio and mine. Jacobs sees the oratorio as a Christian poem and proof of Auden’s Christianity—which coincides with Auden’s turn away from his Romantic roots. I interpret the piece as a sign of Auden’s continuing commitment to his Romantic inheritance and intent to serve as an aesthetic (not religious) hero, exploring the aesthetic possibilities to which his imagination is drawn. After delineating the problems each of us has in applying our respective claims, I explain mine as offering the more troublesome challenge of the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second Clement suffers from a lack of clarity about its historical and literary contexts. The anonymous text's date and provenance have defied precise determination and, although it is referred to a few times in the history of tradition, it seems not to be cited at all. Moreover, its first two verses maintain a history of translation into modern languages employing expressions long out of date. The word, ... occurs four times in the first two verses, twice as part of the expression, .... This article identifies the outmoded nature of current translations of these words and proposes an updated translation that better reflects important new interpretations of the text's purpose, values, and assumptions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the story of the castle or city of Cherson and the Maiden Gykia, which serves as the concluding chapter of the significant tenth-century treatise on Byzantine imperial governance, known since the sixteenth century by its Latin title "De administrando imperio." It is stated that it presents the conventional reading of the story of Cherson, and propose a new interpretation of it.

Orientius's Cotnmonitorium contains a well-known passage describing the damage done to the landscape of Gaul following the barbarian invasions of the early fifth century. This article examines the juxtaposition of the ruined physical world and the spiritual world beyond in the Commonitorium and three other poetic texts from this period--the Epigramma Paulini, Ad coniugem, and De prouidentia Dei. Compared to his contemporaries, Orientius is shown to be less absolute in his renunciation of the world around him. Situating these works in the ecclesiastical context of Gaul in the fifth century, I argue that Orientius offers a pastoral perspective on the Christian's relationship with the wider world, whereas his fellow poets represent the more exclusive views of the emerging ascetic elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents three Greek hymns to Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier, written by the eminent Polish Jesuit and lexicographer Grzegorz Cnapius. The poems were added to the second volume of his dictionary Thesaurus Polono-Latino-Graecus printed in 1626. Their first modern edition, prepared by Janina Czerniatowicz and included in the anthology Corpusculum poesis Polono-Graecae saeculorum XVI–XVII (1531–1648), Wrocław 1991, is based on the second edition of the dictionary from 1644, which contains several errors. The main goal of the paper is, therefore, to produce an edition of the three hymns based on editio princeps of the dictionary's second volume, published in 1626. Cnapius composed and delivered the hymns on the celebration of the canonization of the two Jesuits, which took place in Kraków. The hymns are written in hexameter and elegiac distich. The first poem to Ignatius Loyola is an alphabetical acrostic, while the second is a complex acrostic, the initial letters making the name Francis and the last – Xavier. In the third poem Cnapius praises the missionary work of Francis Xavier by comparing him to Alexander the Great, Heracles and Bacchus. The hymns contain many rare Greek words and prove Grzegorz Cnapius's excellent knowledge of the Greek language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]