Faith Hope And Poetry

Faith, Hope and Poetry is a book that explores the role of poetry in understanding reality and its contribution to religious knowledge and theology. The author, Malcolm Guite, presents critical analyses of English poetry from different time periods and applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues. The book also delves into the paradoxical ways in which poetry of doubt and despair can enrich theology. Guite's original analysis and application of the poetic vision of Coleridge, Larkin, and Seamus Heaney further contribute to a theology of imagination. This book encourages readers to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their academic pursuits and provides new insights and enthusiasm for reading poetry.

Explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times onwards, the author applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. Faith, Hope and Poetry explores the poetic imagination as a way of knowing; a way of seeing reality more clearly. Presenting a series of critical appreciations of English poetry from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day, Malcolm Guite applies the insights of poetry to contemporary issues and the contribution poetry can make to our religious knowing and the way we 'do theology'. This book is not solely concerned with overtly religious poetry, but attends to the paradoxical ways in which the poetry of doubt and despair also enriches theology. Developing an original analysis and application of the poetic vision of Coleridge, Larkin and Seamus Heaney in the final chapters, Guite builds towards a substantial theology of imagination and provides unique insights into truth that complement and enrich more strictly rational ways of knowing. Readers of this book will return to their reading of poetry equipped with new insights and enthusiasm and will be challenged to integrate imaginative ways of knowing into their other academic and intellectual pursuits.