Damn straight!
William S. | 07.31.03 - 6:47 am | #

Shameless plug:
ELC | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 8:57 am | #

Oops. Catholic Poets @ ELCore.Net
ELC | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 8:58 am | #

If you take in Anglo-Catholics: T. S. Eliot. And W. B. Yeats by a stretch.

I can't think of any others.

You show good taste with Hopkins, Mr. Mark, sir. But I don't have the emotional connection with H. that I do with Eliot and Yeats.

Non Catholic poets? How about them, too. Gotta be eucumenical, y'know.
Good Ole Charlie | 07.31.03 - 9:10 am | #

Yes, Yeats:

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the
worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

I think of those lines from "The Second Coming" (http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~benjamin/316kfall/ 316ktexts/yeatssecond.html) often these days.
Kyle Eller | 07.31.03 - 11:00 am | #

Yeats was not Catholic, even by upbringing, but rather Anglo-Irish Protestant. He was not a believer, in any case, taking up with Nietzschean philosophy and some really wacky spiritism (see "A Vision").

Alexander Pope was thoroughly Catholic, but generally left his faith out of his poetry. Pretty smart, for an Englishman in the 18th Century.

Ben Jonson was Catholic for a time, then reverted to Anglicanism (a politically-inspired move, as he lived even closer to the dark days under Elizabeth I).

Wallace Stevens is terrific, but he did not convert until on his deathbed. I like to count him, though.
Don Boyle | 07.31.03 - 11:04 am | #

You people!

First: most common position on Shakespeare is that he was raised by Recusant Catholics, hence the sacramental imagination, etc, though practiced as a Church o' Englander (which was, ya know, in those days a lot more Catholic-y)

Second: there are plenty more English speaking Catholic poets. A couple of the most famous, in historical order:
The "Pearl" poet (also thought to've written Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
William Langland
Geoffrey Chaucer
Richard Crashaw
John Dryden
Alexander Pope
Mark Wyman | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 11:06 am | #

BTW,
John Donne and Ben Jonson were both raised Catholic but ditched the Faith for political reasons.
Mark Wyman | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 11:08 am | #

OK, 2 more:
Seamus Heaney (IMHO, the most readable living poet in English)
Czeslaw Milosz (still going strong at 92)
Don Boyle | 07.31.03 - 11:12 am | #

The 5.9.2003 Commonweal had an article by Andrew Krivak on the Catholic poets Marie Ponsot, Lawrence Joseph, and Adam Zagajewski. Here is a Zagajewski poem written after 9/11.
The margins won't come out right, of course.

Try to Praise the Mutilated World
Adam Zagajewski, trans from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh.

Try to praise the mutilated world.
Remember June's long days,
and wild strawberries, drops of wine, the dew.
The nettles that methodically overgrow
the abandoned homesteads of exiles.
You must praise the mutilated world.
You watched the stylish yachts and ships;
one of them had a long trip ahead of it,
while salty oblivion awaited others.
You've seen the refugees heading nowhere,
you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.
You should praise the mutilated world.
Remember the moments when we were together
in a white room and the curtain fluttered.
Return in thought to the concert where music flared.
You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
Neil Dhingra | 07.31.03 - 11:40 am | #

Ah, but the margins came through! I can now mention my favorite poet, the Welsh Anglican priest, R.S. Thomas:

The Coming

And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.
Neil Dhingra | 07.31.03 - 11:44 am | #

Nobody's mentioned St. Robert Southwell, S.J.- poet, priest, and martyr.
Donna Marie Lewis | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 11:51 am | #

Try the poetry channel at Catholic Exchange. As editor I try to offer as many good contemporary poems, by unknown Catholic writers, as I can. Some of these poems are strong by any standard.

I've also recently begun presenting old published ones.

Joseph Mary Plunkett was there a few weeks ago.

There happens to be one of mine at present, but try the archives - box on the lefthand side.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 11:54 am | #

How about Rainer Maria Rilke, the great German poet? He was Catholic and wrote some poems with a Catholic content, I believe, although he was principally a love poet (not contradictory, I know). And then there was Dante of course.
Arnold | 07.31.03 - 12:08 pm | #

Don't forget Dylan at http://darkoctober618.blogspot.com/
Don | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 12:36 pm | #

Have never been able to get into Rilke. His "spirituality" seems fake. Auden called him "the greatest lesbian poet since Sappho." Yikes!
Don Boyle | 07.31.03 - 12:54 pm | #

Dante! Dante! Dante!

Also would have to put Phillip Lamantia in there and Jack Kerouac (on again, off again, but always a Catholic at heart, and died a Catholic).
Erik Keilholtz | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 1:03 pm | #

Thomas Stearns Eliot (must be at the head of the list)
G.K. Chesterton
Hilaire Belloc
J.R.R Tolkien
Oscar Wilde (another deathbed conversion)

Should have been Catholic:
CS Lewis
Robert Graves
Patrick Sweeney | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 1:16 pm | #

Other famed Catholic poets of non-english verse include St. John of the Cross, Victor Hugo (I believe), and Boccaccio.
Mark Wyman | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 1:19 pm | #

Ahem:

among the non-dead, check out Canadian poets Maggie Helwig,
http://www.ecwpress.com/books/ on...onebuilding.htm

Tim Lillburn

and Margaret Avison:

http://www.library.utoronto.ca/c...npoetry/avison/

And I don't suck, either.
Kathy | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 1:21 pm | #

My favorite poem by St. Robert Southwell (1562-1595)...(The spelling has been modernized. )

A Child My Choice

Let folly praise that fancy loves, I praise and love that Child,
Whose heart no thought, whose tongue no word, whose hand no deed defiled.
I praise Him most, I love Him best, all praise and love are His;
While Him I love, in Him I live, and cannot live amiss.
Love's sweetest mark, laud's highest theme, man's most desired light,
To love Him life, to leave Him death, to live in Him delight.
He mine by gift, I His by debt, thus each to other due.
First friend He was, best friend He is, all times will try Him true.
Though young yet wise, though small yet strong; though man yet God He is;
As wise He knows, as strong He can, as God He loves to bless.
His knowledge rules, His strength defends, His love doth cherish all;
His birth our joy, His life our light, His death our end of thrall.
Alas! He weeps, He sighs, He pants, yet do His angels sing;
Out of His tears, His sighs and throbs, doth bud a joyful spring.
Almighty Babe, whose tender arms can force all foes to fly,
Correct my faults, protect my life, direct me when I die!
Donna Marie Lewis | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 1:37 pm | #

Don't forget Charles Peguy, who wrote some extraordinary religious poems, translated memorably by Julien Green, another Catholic writer.
Historicaal English poets: don't forget John Dryden and Alice Meynell. What about Alfred Noyes?
Sandra Miesel | 07.31.03 - 1:44 pm | #

My husband heard me in the next room cry "Oh!" when the name Margaret Avison came up. We studied her poem "The Butterfly" in my college poetry class but without any mention of her religion.
And obviously the whole corpus of medieval lit is "Catholic poetry" including the Goliards.
Sandra Miesel | 07.31.03 - 1:47 pm | #

I'd add: David Jones, Sor Juana de la Cruz, Padraic Pearse (wrote mostly in Gaelic, but his few English lyrics are stirring), Allen Tate, Roy Campbell, Francois Villon, William Dunbar, Gavin Douglas and "Blind Harry." Not to mention the greatest writer of Catholic hymns, St Thomas Aquinas. And I'll fess up--Hopkins grates on me.
BTW, I didn't know Wallace Stevens poped on his deathbed. Did his horny feet protrude?
Cecil
C.H. Ross | 07.31.03 - 4:08 pm | #

C.H., re: Wallace Stevens

Documented in Peter Brazeau's oral biography of WS, "Parts of a World: Wallace Stevens Remembered." Also see Janet McCann's "Wallace Stevens Revisited: The Celestial Possible." Brazeau interviewed the priest who baptized WS in the hospital as well as several friends and business acquaintances who were aware of the conversion.

WS's daughter, Holly, who was his literary executor, was in deep denial about the conversion of this lifelong agnostic. Debate rages among academics as well, who generally don't want to believe it. (You'd never guess it from his poetry.) For example, see the otherwise excellent Library of America volume of Stevens, which has a detailed chronology of his life but no mention of the conversion, or even of its possibility.
Don Boyle | 07.31.03 - 5:05 pm | #

What was Lorca's name doing on that list? I thought he was a militant atheist.

Or did he, too, undergo a deathbed conversion?
alias clio | 07.31.03 - 6:03 pm | #

Lorca: far as I know active homosexual. Would not exclude him from the canon of poets, but maybe not Catholic poets.

He would not likely have died before a firing squad if he had been at all Catholic in life.

Who is 'Sor Juana de la Cruz'? Jane of the Cross?
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 6:22 pm | #

My bad: was based on a quick Web search, and even a slightly deeper look would have revealed that Lorca is at best a dubious inclusion. Sorry for any confusion.
Kyle Eller | 07.31.03 - 6:33 pm | #

Lorca's very good as a poet - just wouldn't think of him as a Catholic poet.

Artists can be of great importance without being good boys and girls.

Celine as a prose writer. Caravaggio as a painter.

The Good Lord often gives great talent to the conventionally disreputable.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 7:29 pm | #

It's an interesting correlation... Christians who are poets or novelists are almost always Catholic (or at least very High Anglican, like Lewis and Eliot). Christians who are scientists, on the other hand (such a nuisance you can't simply write "Christian scientists"!) are much more likely to be Protestants: Bayles, Boyle, Conant, Faraday, Newton, Priestley, Rutherford, Polkinghorne, and -- stretching “Protestant” to its widest extreme -- Swedenborg. (Ironically, one of the best-known Catholic scientists, after Galileo, is John Rock ... inventor of the oral contraceptive pill).
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 7:49 pm | #

PS. And Mark, that last of mine is JUST an observation, not an attempt to point-score. Believe me, I'd _like _there to be more great Protestant poets and novelists besides Milton and Larry Woiwode...!

PPS. I think there's a famous contemporary scientist who's Catholic. Someone help out here ... surname is Indian or Sri Lankan? Astronomy or DNA research?

PPPS: Ultra-High Anglicans: Owen Barfield and Charles Williams too, of course.

PPPPS: I'm not a Shakespeare expert, but I have read somewhere that his scriptural quotations follow the Geneva Bible. That, of course, doesn't of itself make him Protestant.
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 8:14 pm | #

Neither Tolstoi, nor Pushkin, nor Dostoevsky, nor Gogol, nor Chekhov were Catholics.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 8:23 pm | #

Pavel: Sorry, that was my Westernocentrism. I should have said "High Anglicans or Eastern Orthodox" -- ie, "non-papal sacerdotalist-sacramentalist/ Apostolic-successionist ritualist Christians." Or "Non-Protestant non-Catholics", for short!
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 9:06 pm | #

Gosh, I was trying to think of a word:
Occidentism? : )

Anyway, who knows what act of contrition or prayer to the Blessed Virgin unchurched Catholics (Lorca?) may have uttered in their minds as they died?

Count no one out. To see God is to love Him boundlessly.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 9:14 pm | #

Actually, the number of great Catholic scientists outnumbers, I think, that of great Protestants. According to Steve Barr's awesome new book, "Modern physics and Ancient Faith":
Robert Grosseteste, Thomas Brawardine, Nicholas or Oresme, Nicolas of Cusa, Copernicus, Martine Mersenne, Christoph Scheiner, Francesco Grimaldi, Giovanni Riccioli, Pietro Secchi, giuseppe piazzi, Lazzaro Spallanzani, etc. Mostly priests and monks.

Also included is the father of modern genetics, Gregor Mendel (a monk). All were responsible for some great innovation.
Tom Harmon | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 10:26 pm | #

Hey, was 'piazzi' an ancestor of e. e. cummings?
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 10:37 pm | #

Tom,

You forgot Galileo - one of the greatest.

Who's the 20th cent. Belgian physicist, also a Jesuit priest?
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 07.31.03 - 10:40 pm | #

Tom H: Okay, I stand corrected, although, apart from Copernicus, Nicholas and Mendel, those guys are not as well-known as the Prot team (NOT THAT THAT PROVES ANYTHING, OKAY).

Also, if the Thomas Bra[d]wardine you mention is the 14th-century archbishop of Canterbury, then there's a lot of Protestants who'd claim him as one of our own, based on his views on faith vs works.

Still trying to recall the Indian/ Sri Lankan name. Anyone?
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 10:41 pm | #

On the fiction-writing side, we do have Bunyan, Dickens, Louisa May Alcott (?), Jane Austen (?), and [boos and hisses ready, all you Newmanites] Charles Kingsley. So maybe the great chasm is only a dry creek-bed.
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 10:45 pm | #

Fr Stanley Jaki?
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 10:47 pm | #

And "bang" is how my theory goes as well. I first devised the hypothesis when Jonah Goldberg wrote something in National Review about how Prots are anti-scientific Luddites. Immediately started listing the great Prot scientists I could think of. But I left out the Catholics. D'oh.
Tom Round | 07.31.03 - 11:13 pm | #

LeMaitre it is.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 08.01.03 - 12:42 am | #

Georges Lemaitre, S.J., originator of the Big Bang theory.
SJ | 08.01.03 - 7:59 am | #

Practical life lesson: You can't post a comment, go to bed, get up in the morning, come downstairs, and refresh the computer screen without doing a double post and looking like an idiot.
SJ | 08.01.03 - 8:03 am | #

Scientists: Alexis Carrel, Pierre Duhem, Johannes Keppler, Jerome Lejeune! God rest his (Lejeune's) soul; pray for us, especially those in prolife work.

Science only flourished in Catholic Christian culture because of its ideas about the world. Read Fr Stanley Jaki's writings on this idea. Fab.

Protestantism early on had biases against reason and philosophy, which of course are the underpinnings of science. So I'm wondering if the great Prot scientists come later, are nominal or "naughty" Prots. ???

Can I have the same sentence as Galileo? I want to live out the rest of my life in an estate in the south of France, free to do whatever intellectual work I want to....

Alas, mere wage slave here. *sigh*
Elizabeth | 08.01.03 - 10:07 am | #

Tom:

There are three Indians that I would nominate to the A-List. All - I think - were Hindi, especially the great, great mathematician Ramanujan. His life is fascinating: once he claimed to have a vision of the goddess Kali who discussed math with him. There are good biographies around on Ramanujan: read one.

The astrophysicist Chandasehkar (bet I've miss-spelled his name, but I'm close) is next. All sorts of work on exotic stellar objects, including a description of neutron - collapsed - stars that he wrote on the boat to England to study in grad school. He had his Nobel, you might say, before he stepped off the boat. "Chandra" was a fine figure of a man, always dressed in a suit of "Chandra blue".

The next one would be S. Bose. He and Einstein were collaborators on statistics of "Bosonic" particles. Very important work as it turned out: it's now one of the cornerstones of modern physical theory.

Remember Fr. LeMaitre. While he had the insight to proposed a Big Bang, sort of, he didn't have the modern knowledge of particle physics to back himself up. But his intuition was sharp and he knew where to point others to find the backup. One of my heroes, BTW. I saw his bust in the headquarter of the Vatican Observatory: it's right as you enter the main building. How about sainthood for Fr. Georges, eh??
Good Ole Charlie | 08.01.03 - 10:12 am | #

Pavel: Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz (sorry for inadvertently omitting part of the name in my first post) was a seventeenth cenrury Mexican nun of the Order of St Jerome who is widely considered one of the greatest writers of Spanish baroque poetry. An unfortunate recent development: although perfectly orthodox, she had a run-in with her bishop (a low-wattage type, it appears) and thus she is now being absurdly touted by radical feminists as one of their forerunners. Ignore that stuff, and check her out. You're in for a treat.
Cecil
C.H. Ross | 08.01.03 - 10:21 am | #

Saint John Henry Newman! (My hero! And I say Saint because HE SHOULD BE CANONIZED BY NOW!) Here's a short one.

RELICS OF SAINTS

"He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; for all live unto Him."

"The Fathers are in dust, yet live to God:"--
So says the Truth; as if the motionless clay
Still held the seeds of life beneath the sod,
Smouldering and struggling till the judgment-day.

And hence we learn with reverence to esteem
Of these fail houses, through the grave confines;
Sophist may urge his cunning tests, and deem
That they are earth;--but they are heavenly shrines.

Also William Luse's poetry on his blog. Very nice!

My mother spoke in poetry, and wrote poetry for family events that was funny and personal and warm. God rest her rhymin' soul.
Elizabeth | 08.01.03 - 10:25 am | #

Oops, butchered a line:
Of these fail houses, through the grave confines;

should read:

Of these frail houses, though the grave confines;

Some imp shoved the "r" to the wrong spot during the upload. Out, damned imp! *scrub, scrub, scrub*
Elizabeth | 08.01.03 - 10:28 am | #

I'll try, Cecil, to find Sr. Juana.

My favorite Christian poet is George Herbert. Anglican priest.

Favorite Christian painter: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio - Catholic, scapegrace, ruffian, murderer, fugitive, of immense gifts and paradoxically great humility.

He once asked someone what the holy water in the font was for.

'For venial sins.'

'Then I don't need it - all my sins are mortal.'

His last painting shows David holding the gigantic, grotesque head of Goliath by the hair. The face of Goliath is his, Caravaggio's.

I walked into a gallery here in DC where they were briefly showing the recently discovered Taking of Jesus (in a Jesuit house in Dublin, btw).

Jesus wept, they say, and so do people who see this painting.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 08.01.03 - 12:18 pm | #

Elizabeth- re: your comment on Venerable Newman- pray for miracles !
Donna Marie Lewis | Homepage | 08.01.03 - 3:54 pm | #

Also Blaise Pascal – although, seeing that he was a Jansenist, perhaps he should be credited half to Rome and half to Geneva…

[Re any Catholic scientists who lived before the Reformation: it's plausible that at least some of them might have jumped ship had they lived later. If the only alternatives at the time were Catholicism and Albigensianism, I'd have stayed too …]

When I was at univ, there were two broadly Protestant student clubs. One was almost completely dominated by arts and social work students (who tended to be Arminian, to the extent they had their theology defined) while the other was equally dominated by science and medical students, who knew precisely that they were all four- or even five-point Calvinists!
Tom Round | 08.02.03 - 8:34 am | #

Wasn't Roger Bacon a friar?

On the other side, the mathematician John Napier of Merchison offered the Scots kings a secret weapon he claimed to have invented that would stop the Popes re-conquering Scotland ...!

In true Popperian scientific style, I have amended my original hypothesis and will now re-test. Instead of "famous scientists are much more likely to be Prots [than to be Catholics]", I'll try out "famous Prots are much more likely to be scientists [than they are to be novelists/ poets]." Prots might say this is because Prots are more concerned with finding truth than with creating beauty. Caths and Orthx might attribute it instead to the Reformation killing off the sacramental imagination... (I've heard both arguments).
Tom Round | 08.03.03 - 4:08 am | #

Tom:

You wrote: "Caths and Orthx might attribute it instead to the Reformation killing off the sacramental imagination...". Interesting...

Have you a reference to this?

As far as Prots, I have heard it remarked that - thanks to Inquisitions leaning on Galileo, the scientific community effectively moved to Northern Europe. Thus, the Industrial Revolution happened first amongst the Prot North, shifting political power to the Prot countries. And the Catholic South has never really caught up, politically and scientifically.

You certainly have observed the political end of things. And the enumerations of scientists have confirmed the scientific. And in this last case, most of them are either Jewish (very common, way out of proportion to their number in the general population) or Anglo-Saxon.

For laughs, we should survey the Nobel Prizes in science and medicine, plus the Fields Award in math.

Best Regards
Good Ole Charlie | 08.03.03 - 1:34 pm | #

GOC,

I've heard statements along those lines from both sides, but most were pre-Google so I don't have an easy reference handy. Something in Chesterton, I think?

One eg. I can fairly easily lay hands on is HW Crocker's article in CRISIS last Nov at http://www.crisismagazine.com/no...2/feature6.htm: "Catholicism has always surrounded itself with beauty, regarding it as the splendor of truth. ... The Puritan influence is foreign to Catholicism ... The Catholic Church leaves such Talibanism to the Protestants and iconoclastic heresies. The Catholic Church, instead, offers a celebration of beauty ..."

I don't think this is a particularly controversial claim -- most Prots (Lutherans excepted) would agree with the facts, though not of course HWC's value judgment.

BTW, if this temperament steers Prots towards science rather than art, it should a fortiori have the same effect on Jews. (But not Muslims?!)
Tom Round | 08.03.03 - 7:48 pm | #