Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible: Volume II: Gospels to Revelation

by Robert Atwan (Editor), Laurance Wieder (Editor), Laurence Wieder (Editor)

For generations, poets have turned to the Bible for insight and inspiration. What did so many creative minds find in scripture? Is the Bible still a vital source of poetic inspirations? Chapters Into Verse is the first comprehensive collection ever made of poems written in English inspired by the Bible. A ground-breaking anthology, it introduces readers to a distinct heritage of English poetry: the scriptural tradition. Though frequently ignored and sometimes suppressed, this tradition rivals the classical and is every bit as venerable. Drawing a unique map of the history of English poetry, the two volumes of Chapters Into Verse survey and define the literary legacy of the Scriptures from the fourteenth century to the present. Each volume is arranged in scriptural order, and each poem is preceded by the biblical passage that inspired it. Thus readers can conveniently witness the various ways sacred text has sparked the imagination of poets throughout the ages. Volume II follows the Gospels (harmonized) through Revelation. The collection features verses both famous and unfamiliar, from John Donne's meditative masterpieces to D.H. Lawrence's quirky expostulations. The editors have included poems by virtually all the prominent religious poets - among them, John Milton, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Taylor, Christopher Smart, and Gerard Manly Hopkins. Included, too, are devotional and visionary works from a wide range of vintage poets - Edmund Spenser, Alexander Pope, Robert Burns, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Proving that the Bible is just as powerful a source of inspiration today as it was in the past, thecollection assembles a mixed congregation of modern and contemporary poets, such as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Elizabeth Bishop, Delmore Schwartz, Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, Countee Cullen, William Butler Yeats, John Berryman, Robert Graves, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, Lee Murray

Genres: Poetry

432 pages, Hardcover

First published May 6, 1993

About the author

Robert Atwan has been the series editor of The Best American Essays since its inception in 1986. He has edited numerous literary anthologies and written essays and reviews for periodicals nationwide.

Reviews

[Ambrose Miles · Rating 4 out of 5]

3 1/2 stars

[JD Waggy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sadly, this wasn't quite as amazing to me as the Old Testament (volume 1), and I'm not totally sure why. I think a lot of is that there's an awful lot of theology and philosophy in the NT (more so than the OT) that doesn't lend itself as well to poetry. I think also the selections in this volume were less broad. I was surprised that there weren't more, for lack of a better word, angry poems in this volume--I know of several very passionate tirades against various pieces of the NT that didn't make it into this.
That being said, this is still an incredible and incredibly useful book. Again, I like that each poem is connected to its inspiration verse(s). And, though it took me a bit to get used to, I appreciated the editorial choice to conflate the Gospels (poems inspired by any of the Gospels are listed by event rather than verse, so instead of poems based on Matthew you have poems based on the time Jesus walked on water). As a side bonus, it was good to see the Gospel connections from that angle.
I was far more moved as a writer and a reader by the first volume, but I delighted in this one as well and will be keeping it on the shelf for future inspirations.

Merged review:

I was surprised to find that I didn’t like this as much as the first volume. I think a large part of that was that the Old Testament is inherently more poetic to begin with, what with the whole Psalms thing and the image-laden stories and angst of a wandering people. The NT has a lot more abstract theology that can be harder to translate. Also, the editing in this volume felt far less solid, which is odd considering it’s the same people. Beyond a noticeable uptic in typos, there were just a lot of odd editorial choices: a wide selection of really long poems and excerpts, a curiously thin selection of modern poems, and a lot of very tangential connections between poems and their Scriptures. Again, a lot of the NT is hard to write on (whether because of intangibility or because it’s easier to be angry with the OT and therefore write that passion), I get that. I just wasn’t as overwhelmed and pushed to my own muse by this volume.

I do still love the concept, though. And I think the way they did the Gospels was smart--rather than trying to match every poem to a specific Gospel verse, the editors took poems that were responding to various parables and instances and paired them with the verse nearest to that point. They amalgamated the Gospels into one (which is far easier with the synoptics than with John, but they managed it) fairly coherent storyline and added in poems as relevant, and it worked pretty well. Again, though, the selections were a bit weird in terms of all the great Gospel-inspired English poetry out there.

[Gilbert Wesley Purdy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Selections from the New Testament of the Bible (ASV it would appear) are followed by poems selected from all modern eras of English language poetry. The selections tend to be particularly well chosen. This is a beautiful book.