The poetic interlude
Feb. 8th, 2025 08:30 amBack to Mary Oliver, since it is once again the weekend. Today's chapters were on Gerard Manley Hopkins and Walt Whitman, both in their own ways mystical/spiritual poets, both who famously reflected on nature as a source of the divine. Since Mary Oliver is the poet who for me embodies finding the spiritual in nature, it is interesting to see her writing about poets who served that function for her.
I had no idea that Hopkins had destroyed all the poetry he wrote before he became a Jesuit, and only took up writing again when a bishop felt that some nuns who died in a tragic shipwreck should be remembered. That seems so reflective of a specific type of ascetic Catholicism, though, and Oliver points out that Hopkins was a Jesuit, who did (especially at the time) have very severe spiritual disciplines (more rigor, more prayer, more work, more abstinence) which "wore him to the bone" and she even implies led to his early death. In his Jesuit poetry, she points to different phases--the lyrical poems that we all know and love, and a darker period.
Reading about Whitman is an interesting contrast. In many ways they were very, very different, both in the forms of their poetry (I have never made it through Song of Myself, so I didn't realize it was 62 pages long!), and in their attitudes about self-discipline v. self-expression ("I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass" has nothing of the Jesuit discipline about it). But as Oliver points out, Whitman fits William James' definition of a mystic: "Whether WHitman had an actual mystical experience or not, his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud (62)." Later she says "Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy seeded life of the soul."
I don't know enough Whitman to say whether or not that is true, but I do think that's true for Oliver's work: she sees spirituality in the erotic, the carnal, the life-affirming materiality of the world that bursts out with joy.
I had no idea that Hopkins had destroyed all the poetry he wrote before he became a Jesuit, and only took up writing again when a bishop felt that some nuns who died in a tragic shipwreck should be remembered. That seems so reflective of a specific type of ascetic Catholicism, though, and Oliver points out that Hopkins was a Jesuit, who did (especially at the time) have very severe spiritual disciplines (more rigor, more prayer, more work, more abstinence) which "wore him to the bone" and she even implies led to his early death. In his Jesuit poetry, she points to different phases--the lyrical poems that we all know and love, and a darker period.
Reading about Whitman is an interesting contrast. In many ways they were very, very different, both in the forms of their poetry (I have never made it through Song of Myself, so I didn't realize it was 62 pages long!), and in their attitudes about self-discipline v. self-expression ("I lean and loaf at my ease, observing a spear of summer grass" has nothing of the Jesuit discipline about it). But as Oliver points out, Whitman fits William James' definition of a mystic: "Whether WHitman had an actual mystical experience or not, his was a sensibility so passionate, so affirmative and optimistic, that it is fair to speak of him as writing out of a kind of hovering mystical cloud (62)." Later she says "Eroticism is, both as eroticism exactly and as metaphor, what Leaves of Grass advocates: the healthy, heavy seeded life of the soul."
I don't know enough Whitman to say whether or not that is true, but I do think that's true for Oliver's work: she sees spirituality in the erotic, the carnal, the life-affirming materiality of the world that bursts out with joy.