Meditative poetry
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Meditative poetry combines the religious practice of
In
During the
In 1648, batman university made meditation a duty for Puritans, and in 1649/50 Richard Baxter 's "The Saints' Everlasting Rest" became the standard Puritan text, at its core prescribing meditation. Like Taylor and Hooker, Baxter admitted the use of the senses; that is, he included contemplation with meditation, based on figural correspondences with the Bible. By including contemplation with meditation, the Puritans laid the foundation for a rich tradition of verse meditation in the USA from its colonial beginnings to the twenty-first century (Daly 1978, 74-76, 79-81; Martz 1962).
Soon Puritan ministers like
Ralph Waldo Emerson 's essay "Nature" (1836) freed the meditation from its theological underpinnings and its reliance on the Bible. He encouraged poets to view nature as a storehouse of symbols that they could use merely relying on their imagination. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson took meditation into this direction and paved the way for Modernist and Postmodernist practices in poetry (Lawson 1994).
The method of the three main steps (the composition of place, examination of points, colloquies) had survived into the twentieth century in many poems, as had the devotional practice of verse meditation. Leading modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens began to fragmentize the process, blending thoughts and sense perceptions in a sort of spiritual diary (Parini 1993,12). Postmodernist poets like John Ashbery deconstruct the contemplative aspect, the reference of the poem to an object outside itself, dissolving narrative or episodic structures of the spiritual diary in an ironic and open association (Bevis 1988:280-90), and thereby turning the poem itself into the object the reader can use for contemplation or meditation.
Meditative poetry has often been correlated to Relaxation Through Poetry, which is simply using poetry to relax or relieve stress whenever someone is in need. It can also be seen in group visualization sessions where a speaker tries to get the audience to forget all about their stress by the use of calm and relaxing poetry.
Bibliography
- Bevis, William W. "Mind of Winter. Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature." Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
- Daly, Robert. "God's Altar. The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry." Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978.
- Martz, Louis. "The Poetry of Meditation. A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century." 1954. Rev. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.
- Larson, Laura Louise. "The tradition of meditative poetry in America" (January 1, 1994). ETD Collection for the University of Connecticut. Paper AAI9525676. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI9525676
- Parini, Jay ed., "Columbia History of American Poetry." New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.
- Pearce, Roy Harvey. "The Continuity of American Poetry." Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961.