Conf/CfP - The Poetics of Faith: Exploring Belief in Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 12-14 January 2018, UK

The Poetics of Faith: Exploring Belief in Modern and Contemporary Poetry

12-14 January 2018, University of York

TS Eliot wrote that ‘[t]he trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did’. Modern and contemporary poets, faced with the often stark realities of an industrial and post-industrial world, with the two world wars and their moral implications, and with social and economic changes, have found themselves needing to evaluate such new ways of feeling towards God. Grappling with questions of war and exploring the morality of ecology, as Elizabeth Bishop did, seeking the transcendental in the muddy trenches of the First World War, as David Jones did, or sometimes writing with profound awareness of Adorno’s claim that ‘to write poetry after Auschwitz’ is barbaric, modern and contemporary poets have been continuously fashioning new ways to feel and think about God. These new ways of believing and feeling are at times fraught with anxiety, as in the case of Geoffrey Hill, and at times pervaded by a newly discovered doctrinal certainty, as in the case of the Australian poet Les Murray.