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Exploring a range of twentieth and twenty-first century Marian prayer-poetry – poem-prayers directed to or involving Mary – by poets such as T. S. Eliot, David Jones, Geoffrey Hill, Elizabeth Jennings, Hilary Davies and Rowan Williams, this book traces its resurgence from the late nineteenth-century to the present day.
By the early twentieth century, the once widespread and fervent cult of the Virgin Mary had been at best deeply hidden, if not entirely absent from England's religious life, since the Reformation. The figure of Mary similarly largely vanished from English poetry, only to return, gradually, as Marian devotion revived in the nineteenth century. The perception of it as somehow un-English, which had developed during the centuries of its absence, presented a challenge to poets who wished to take up the Marian theme in the modern day. This book looks at some ways in which male and female poets from both Roman Catholic and Anglican backgrounds responded to this situation. It also argues that the figure of Mary is a type of John Henry Newman's category of “real assent”: commitment that is not merely intellectual, but involves the totality of a person's being in relation to God.
Published | 13 Nov 2025 |
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Format | Hardback |
Edition | 1st |
Extent | 224 |
ISBN | 9781350507371 |
Imprint | Bloomsbury Academic |
Dimensions | 234 x 156 mm |
Series | New Directions in Religion and Literature |
Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing |
That there are poems which are also prayers has long been known. That the Virgin Mary has been the focus of so many poems in the British Isles has perhaps not been properly appreciated until now. Jean Ward's beautiful study of Marian poems by writers as distinct as T. S. Eliot and R. S. Thomas, Elizabeth Jennings and Geoffrey Hill, along with an outlier such as Thom Gunn, is an eloquent and much-needed contribution to the study of religion and literature.
Kevin Hart, Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor in the School of Divinity, Duke University, USA
Jean Ward has written an insightful study of the rise and fall-and the rise again-of Marian devotion and its poetic production in England. Ward assesses the demise of Mary in Reformation theological poetics, and her reemergence in some twentieth century English poets, suggesting a theological unease about Mary's place in modern religious representation, from Anglicans like W.H. Auden and T.S. Eliot, to Catholic converts like David Jones, Sebastian Barker and Hilary Davies, to the prominent cradle Catholic, Elizabeth Jennings. Ward offers readers a way to chart Marian poetry in English writers through the centuries.
Mark Bosco, S.J., Georgetown University, USA
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