by John Robert Lee
for Anne Walmsley (1931 – 12 July 2025)
Contributing to a symposium, Faith that illuminates (1935), T.S. Eliot, in a presentation titled “Religion and Literature” said: “…the whole of modern literature is corrupted by what I call Secularism, that it is simply unaware of, simply cannot understand the meaning of, the primacy of the supernatural over the natural life…” Proposing that “the ‘greatness’ of literature cannot be determined solely by literary standards,” he suggested that “literary criticism should be completed by criticism from a definite ethical and theological standpoint.”
Leon Wieseltier, reviewing Czeslaw Milosz’s The Witness of Poetry in 1983 in The New Republic, quotes Milosz’s question to the Harvard audience for his Charles Eliot Norton lectures, “Is non-eschatological poetry possible?” Those lectures were published in the book, and Wieseltier, in his review, noted “Milosz’s insistence upon a dimension of the holy is its appositeness to the age.” For the reviewer, Milosz’s “solution is the resacralization of the world.” And the author himself asks, in the first essay, “How did it happen that to be a poet of the twentieth century means to receive training in every kind of pessimism, sarcasm, bitterness, doubt?”
In what seems the domineering secularism of our time, one can find many important representative voices like Eliot’s and Milosz’s making the case for the sacred and sacramental in our modern literatures. While one can find writers with similar concerns in other cultures, I am reflecting in a general way on Western contemporary writers of the recent past, who have raised the banners of faith and imagination against the all-pervasive pressures of a technologized, materialistic age.
Gregory Wolfe, the American editor and founder of Image: A Journal of the Arts and Religion, has recorded in his book of essays Intruding upon the timeless (2003) how the journal was born. As he puts it, for many, “the secular master narratives, such as Marxism and Freudianism had failed to live up to their initial promise…they left their adherents unable to account for the true wellsprings of good and evil.” He noted that a hunger had grown, “for a deeper understanding of mystery, that borderland where reason fails and only faith and imagination can go.” What Wolfe and his colleagues discovered on launching the magazine (against their fears and doubts) was that “our interest in the intersection between faith and imagination was shared by myriad artists and writers all over the world.” They were not interested in an Image that existed in a “sort of self-imposed religious ghetto…but had to be present on the public square…for it is precisely in the imaginative space created by works of art that a diverse, multicultural society can explore religious matters without the divisiveness of polemics and propositions…into this fragmented and contentious world, art that engages faith can body forth an incarnational balance between the letter and the spirit, make ancient truths new, and allow the time-bound to briefly and tentatively intrude upon the timeless.”
For those seeking a fresh grounding (or perhaps a starting point) to understand the importance and place of the sacred in our lives, Philip Sherrard’s The Sacred in Life and Art (1990) provides a well-wrought beginning. “The very idea of the sacred presupposes to start with the presence of the Divine or the existence of God. Without the Divine – without God – there can be no holiness, nothing sacred.” Gerard Manley Hopkins, in whose work the sacred rests in both the celebratory cry and in dark soul anguish, sings out:
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…”
To manifest the sacred in poetry and to propose its centrality in our secular (now digital and AI) world is to raise the Divine against all that denies it. Sherrard writes, “ the concept of a completely profane world – of a cosmos wholly desacralized – is a fairly recent invention of the human mind…the presence of God…is the initial and ultimately unique presupposition of the sacred, for the simple reason that without that presence there is no sacredness anywhere…the first symptom of the profane mind – of the idolatrous mind – is its habit of separating its ideas of things from the idea of God…[and] you have set out on the path that leads to the desacralization…of the things themselves.”
For Sherrard, “the theme of the transcendent” is crucial to the understanding of the sacred. Many holistic approaches often leave out the transcendent, focusing only on the psychological and physical realms. Poetry that reflects the sacred recognizes, in Sherrard’s words, “without participation in God there can be no escaping fragmentation, disintegration, self-alienation, however much we may struggle against them.” And have these not been distinguishing themes and anxieties of much of our literature for the past century?
On a personal note: it was an epiphanic moment for me, years ago now gone out of memory, when I discovered Francis Thompson’s poem The Kingdom of God. While I was then far from formulating concepts of the sacramental or the sacred in poetry, I was moved by and somehow never forgot, these lines:
“..upon thy so sore loss
Shall shine the traffic of Jacob’s ladder
Pitched betwixt Heaven and Charing Cross.
…And lo, Christ walking on the water
Not of Gennesareth, but Thames.”
OK, so I am a Caribbean person, living most of my life in my small island, Saint Lucia. But in the words of Saint Lucian Nobel laureate Derek Walcott, I had benefited from a “sound colonial education,” and these names out of Imperial Central London were familiar. I struggle to recall, but I know what caught my attention was that bold juxtaposition of Heaven and Charing Cross, of Gennesareth and Thames. Here, through some dim and barely recognized perception, I was pointed to the transcendent, the immanent, the Divine in the mix of the madding crowd and our most mundane activities.
Of course, Thompson’s poem is about that:
“O world invisible, we view thee,
O world intangible, we touch thee,
O world unknowable, we know thee,
Inapprehensible, we clutch thee!”
And he speaks of the naturalness of the inevitable communion of the sacred and the earthy. The drift of angels’ wings, “beats at our own clay-shuttered doors.” So close are they that, “Turn but a stone, and start a wing!” The sacred is among us, and available, but it is our indifferent, careless, agnostic hearts, “that miss the many-splendoured thing.” And so he celebrates, he exalts, he boldly affirms the sacred, comforting presences at Charing Cross and the Thames, travelling graciously with us in our own mind-darkened (“benumbed conceiving”) concrete jungles.
I think now that this poem of Thompson’s was growing its influence deep in the subconscious when I came to write Canticles, a cycle of poems that planted the sacred and transcendent in the named streets of my capital Castries, on the beaches, in the hills of my native island home Saint Lucia. Using images from folk music – its instruments and dances, traditional dress, the Kwéyòl language – as well as contemporary roots reggae music, the kaiso of Shadow, our French Creole konpa and zouk, international news headlines and so on – I wrote poems that I have described as a “Caribbean Pilgrim’s Progress.” Poems of faith rooted in the milieu of flesh and blood reality. Other influences have certainly been Donne and Herbert, Hopkins and Eliot and a host of other modern Caribbean writers like Derek Walcott, Kamau Brathwaite, Lorna Goodison and Kwame Dawes, from whom I learned to see my landscape and society, and to voice in our own rhythms what I observe. As Thompson did, the following locates the Incarnate Christ in my communal life:
“The cascading words of my hand
pluck His praise from eight-string bandolin and local banjo,
place His favour on madras and foulard, the satin and the lace,
plant His steps in mazouk, lakonmèt and gwan won;
point His casual grace in yellow pumpkin star, pendular mango,
plait Him a crown of anthurium and fern — “
And one more:
“O — in the beloved corner shrines of mango blossom, breadfruit palm, almonds’ broad oval leaf,
the chapels of sidewalks’ hasty awnings, the confessionals of indignant minivans,
the fuming censer of the streets’ sulfur speech —
O, at every wary block — His Real Presence, and archangels gossiping of His Parousia.
After poems, psalms. And your canticles.”
That line “after poems, psalms” has now become the title of my latest book with Peepal Tree, where I write a cycle of 20 glosas that grow out of selections from the Book of Psalms.
The place of the sacred in poetry is important today since we must be reminded, as Thompson and other writers have shown, of spiritual realities, of the true nature of our fractured planet. As Sherrard puts it, “An art that possesses a sacred quality is an art that mirrors the miraculous presence of the spiritual world.” And therein is cause for the celebratory, for the hymn, even in our secular, demythologized world.
But Sherrard also points to the serious responsibility of writing the transcendent and immanent and sacred into our poetry and art: “…of this the artist must be sure: that only when his art possesses a sacred quality will it present a positive challenge to our technological world and to the degradation of human life which is endemic to it…” I am with him on that. And my poems seek to hold that sacramental quality in our so sadly broken world…with its racial and ethnic divisions, genocides, burgeoning dictatorships, theocratic autocracies…
About the author
John Robert Lee is a Saint Lucian writer. His After poems, psalms is published by Peepal Tree Press in 2025. Other publications with Peepal Tree include elemental (2008), Collected Poems 1975-2015 (2017), Pierrot (2020), Belmont Portfolio (2023). In 2017, he co-edited with Embert Charles, The Road to Mount Pleasant: Selected essays on Saint Lucian Culture (Saint Lucia: Folk Research Centre). His Saint Lucian Writers and Writing: an Author Index was published by Papillote Press, 2019. A version of this article was published in Agenda (UK) in 2016.
