Poems About God

So I had to hunt up the passage where John Crowe Ransom mentioned the poetical effect of the word "God." The reference is in a brilliant essay by Richard Weaver called "Agrarianism in Exile", quoting Ransom's preface to his Poems About God:

"The first three or four poems that I ever wrote were done in three or four different moods and with no systematic design. I was therefore duly surprised to find that each of them made considerable use of the term God. I studied the matter a little and came to the conclusion that this was the most poetic of all terms possible (pp. 33-34)."

Not to be missed is Weaver's discussion of this fact:

It tells us a great deal about a man to know that he chooses as his form of expression the poetic medium. It tells us, I think, something about his system of ontology. The composition of poetry is evidence that for him values have a reality, and that he is capable of emotion on the subject of value. The entire corpus of the world's poetry rests upon a theory of universal analogy which teaches that all phenomena in some degree resemble each other. There is minimal truth in even the wildest metaphor simply because this world is, from one point of view, a unitary thing. and this amounts to saying that it is a creation. When in the Anglo-Saxon legend a vision appeared to Caedmon and told him to "sing creation," it was as if inspiration were pointing out to the poet his archetypal theme. Now if poetry is this system of universal analogy, and if the analogy mounts up toward that which most resembles everything else, or that which has the most universal being, it is true that all poetry is a form of worship. Poetry and religion have been too often conjoined in cultural history for the union to be fortuitous. It is with the symbol that we make the leap from what can be demonstrated rationally to what cannot, so that the poet as poet is a non-rationalist. And his post-rational demonstrations are about matters of value. Every comparison he makes has its implicative. The poet likens life now to a prosperous sea-voyage; again to the sere and yellow leaf. These do not end with mere description. They place the subject somewhere on this ladder of universal analogy, so that we gain an insight into its relationship to true being. Metaphor, the distinguishing gift of the poet, as Aristotle pointed out, is the bridge between the phenomenal and the noumenal world, and it is no accident that there hangs about the poet, despite his often chequered mundane career, a certain aura of consecration. The practice of poetry amounts in effect to a confession of faith in immanent reality, which is the gravest of all commitments. Poetry on any other assumption would be anomaly." (Southern Essays of Richard Weaver, "Agrarianism in Exile," 32-33.)

I am always astounded by how many powerful concepts Weaver can express in a few sentences. His reflections on myth, poetry, and reality tie in well with some of the profoundest work of Lewis, Tolkien, et al. His discussion of metaphor and creation is suggestive of some later work by Trinitarian theologians, and lastly he manages to bring up Aristotle, Caedmon, and Shakespeare, without even trying. If, however, one were to criticize Weaver for leaving some of his statements open to pantheistic and platonic interpretations, I would have to agree.

Not everyone who says to me, "Lord, Lord,"...

Here is a subject which deserves, and has almost certainly received, a closer examination than I am capable of giving, or am aware of existing. It is true of America as a whole that its speech has been influenced by the King James Bible. Especially in the South, however, the Bible, and liturgics in general, somehow became part of the "grammar" of the culture, even apart from the original meaning of the text. Blues and country songs use the word "Lord" (usually "Lord, Lord") the way Homer used stock epithets--as familiar words with a set rhythm that serve to fill space or complete a rhyme scheme. Many Southern sayings rely on biblical phrases; even tobacco auctioneers would borrow lines from the Bible or gospel songs to round out their cry; and the cry itself was developed from Gregorian chant. A great deal of the cultural furnishings of the South, both high and low, are drawn from the Bible, from liturgical phrases, or church music. Particles of religious language are strewn throughout their day-to-day speechmaking, proverbial sayings, economic dealings, and comments on the weather.

I recall reading somewhere that John Crowe Ransom once asked himself why Southern literature used the word "God" so much, even outside of religious usage. His answer was that, of all words in the human language, "God" was the most poetical. I think this answer gets pretty close to the heart of the matter. When the Allman Brothers sing, "Lord, I was born a ramblin' man" they are invoking, by instinct, the transcendent qualities of that Name, and, by contrast, deepening the pain of their song of earthly mutability. Richard Weaver mentioned a sense of incarnation as an important quality of Southern literature. By incarnation he meant a union of particularity and transcendence, evident in the ability of Faulkner, Warren, et al., to link their minute and concrete images to a strong sense of meaning and eternity. This same incarnational union obtains in the culture out of which this literature sprang, and I suspect something of the sort is going on when the Gregorian modes echo in the cry of a tobacco auctioneer, when a rockabilly singer calls on his Savior while his guitar moans for a lost Eden (which may or may not be a girl), when a redfaced sweating stump orator draws on biblical cadences to heighten his ethos.

This kind of religious saturation of a culture is reminiscent of the Middle Ages, perhaps best seen in Chaucer or in Henryk Sienkiewicz's novels of Poland, where almost every common utterance defaulted to a paternoster or an Ave or mimicked liturgical exchanges in the Divine Service. Perhaps this kinship lends support to the idea that the American South was the last traditional member of western Christendom.