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He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, the Faith of Art
A moving meditation on memory, oblivion, and eternity by one of our most celebrated poetsWhat is it we want when we can’t stop wanting? And how do we make that hunger productive and vital rather than corrosive and destructive? These are the questions that animate Christian Wiman as he explores the relationships between art and faith, death and fame, heaven and oblivion. Above all, He Held Radical Light is a love letter to poetry, filled with moving, surprising, and sometimes funny encounters with the poets Wiman has known. Seamus Heaney opens a suddenly intimate conversation about faith; Mary Oliver puts half of a dead pigeon in her pocket; A. R. Ammons stands up in front of an audience and refuses to read. He Held Radical Light is as urgent and intense as it is lively and entertaining—a sharp sequel to Wiman’s earlier memoir, My Bright Abyss.
130 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 11, 2018
78 people are currently reading
1107 people want to read
About the author
Christian Wiman
144 books323 followersChristian Wiman is an American poet and editor born in 1966 and raised in West Texas. He graduated from Washington and Lee University and has taught at Northwestern University, Stanford University, Lynchburg College in Virginia, and the Prague School of Economics. In 2003 he became editor of the oldest American magazine of verse, Poetry.
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December 10, 2018
‘The true work of art is but a shadow of the divine perfection.’
- Michelangelo
Ever wondered why good poetry calls to us in the depths of our being and leaves us sometimes misty eyed and strangely warmed? I rarely read non-fiction but this past week, I was moved and inspired by an exceptionally well written book that examines the role poetry plays in our lives, in particular in relation to faith. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art is a 2018 publication by Christian Wiman, an American poet (born 1966) and former editor of the world’s top Poetry magazine (2003 to 2013).
I have never heard of Wiman but in the opening pages of this book, I was quite taken by his noble ambition to be a poet, not just any poet, but an impactful one. Wiman says, “When I left college and set out to be a poet, I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever.” This book documents his early days as an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University in the late 1980s, the poets (i.e., A. R. Ammons and Donald Hall) who influenced and shaped his literary career, interesting anecdotes of his interactions with renown poets (e.g., Mary Oliver), his passion for poetry writing, his health struggles at age 39 with a rare blood cancer that awakened a personal quest and fueled questions about the importance of poetry and the link between aesthetic truth and spiritual truth.
The National Poet Laureate David Hall once told Wiman, “I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last.” How humbling! Wiman, then also aged thirty-eight, despite being disturbed, understood that poetry has intrinsic worth because Hall (who became his friend and mentor) went on to write poetry for another fifty years. Wiman’s quest is summed up in one question: What is it, exactly, we want when we can’t stop wanting?’ This novel is a carefully considered, intelligent, and searching discussion of this all important question. I have asked myself the same question: ‘What have I been wanting all these years when I couldn’t stop wanting?’
In writing about his ‘calling’ to be a poet, Wiman is convinced that writing is a profession in which one never arrives. There is for him an existential resistance to writing however strong his passion. Can he truly navigate this powerful current to write without losing himself in it? He quotes Wendell Berry who says ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings.’ And thus, in the creative process, true poetry tends to emerge from within the poet’s own experience with his unfulfilled longing and striving after perfection. In Wiman’s words, “…A poem is part of a life, even the ones you only read.” Poetic words touch us because they hold forth some aesthetic truth, some revelation that illuminates a need or emptiness. The next logical question is: 'Can there even be aesthetic truth without some other, more ultimate truth as precedent?'
I know it is tempting to think that Wiman is probably some crazed or fanatical Christian waxing lyrical about spiritual truth. I read him closely and was relieved to learn that his faith is clear-sighted and not swallowed up in a haze of holy smoke. Wiman confessed to being quite repulsed by writers who congratulate themselves on being delivered from hell fire. In this book, poets such as Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver and A. R. Ammons wrote poems that touch on the spiritual dimension but they were resistant to God. In fact, Ammons professed not to believe in God. Strangely enough, these modern writers share a common tendency: ‘the art contains and expresses a faith that the artist, in the rest of his waking life, rejects.’ What a paradox!
Some of the loveliest writing can be found in episodes of Wiman’s rare encounters with illustrious poets, especially when he was serving as editor of Poetry magazine. He first met A. R. Ammons in a university lecture hall in which the latter, invited as a guest poet, refused to continue reading his poem. He wrote warmly of meeting Mary Oliver for the first time and feeling surprised to find her inappropriately attired in an oversized hunter jacket with half a dead pigeon in her pocket, which she proffered to Wiman like an offering. He wrote movingly, too, about Craig Arnold, a young poet he came to love and respect, and the loss (upon Arnold's untimely death) not just to him but to the poetic community of that life force that conjured up insightful reflections on the existential issues we all face.
Reading this book has acquainted me with several poems by some of the finest poets I have never read. There is Craig Arnold’s wondrous poem titled ‘Meditation on A Grapefruit’ that must be savored. Another poem Wiman quoted that touched me is ‘Sunlight’, Seamus Heaney’s elegy to his aunt. The most deeply affecting was Philip Larkin’s last poem, ‘Aubade’, whose theme is death. This poem gave me ‘ice in my spine’ as Wiman warned it would, as it continued to chill him even after thirty readings. I read ‘Aubade’ at a carpark while waiting to meet a friend for dinner, and remembered sitting there in stunned silence for a long while, and then inundating my unsuspecting friend with my equally 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Wiman used ‘Aubade’ to illustrate the faith of art in these words: ‘One of art’s functions is to give form to feelings that would otherwise remain inchoate and corrosive, to give us a means whereby we can inhabit our fears and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessness haunted by them.’
However, Wiman is adamant that art is only a means to an end. Poetry by itself is not enough; art cannot be seen as redemptive. Why?
At 115 pages, Wiman has written a profound and thought-provoking book. His articulate and elegant prose style has a wondrous facility to give expression to thoughts and feelings that struck me as unutterable. I am not sure I understood everything for now. However, I do know that new understanding awaits me when I re-read it at a future point in time.
My heartfelt thanks to Winston who made me a gift of this gem.
Ever wondered why good poetry calls to us in the depths of our being and leaves us sometimes misty eyed and strangely warmed? I rarely read non-fiction but this past week, I was moved and inspired by an exceptionally well written book that examines the role poetry plays in our lives, in particular in relation to faith. He Held Radical Light: The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art is a 2018 publication by Christian Wiman, an American poet (born 1966) and former editor of the world’s top Poetry magazine (2003 to 2013).
I have never heard of Wiman but in the opening pages of this book, I was quite taken by his noble ambition to be a poet, not just any poet, but an impactful one. Wiman says, “When I left college and set out to be a poet, I thought of nothing but writing a poem that would live forever.” This book documents his early days as an undergraduate at Washington and Lee University in the late 1980s, the poets (i.e., A. R. Ammons and Donald Hall) who influenced and shaped his literary career, interesting anecdotes of his interactions with renown poets (e.g., Mary Oliver), his passion for poetry writing, his health struggles at age 39 with a rare blood cancer that awakened a personal quest and fueled questions about the importance of poetry and the link between aesthetic truth and spiritual truth.
The National Poet Laureate David Hall once told Wiman, “I was thirty-eight when I realized not a word I wrote was going to last.” How humbling! Wiman, then also aged thirty-eight, despite being disturbed, understood that poetry has intrinsic worth because Hall (who became his friend and mentor) went on to write poetry for another fifty years. Wiman’s quest is summed up in one question: What is it, exactly, we want when we can’t stop wanting?’ This novel is a carefully considered, intelligent, and searching discussion of this all important question. I have asked myself the same question: ‘What have I been wanting all these years when I couldn’t stop wanting?’
In writing about his ‘calling’ to be a poet, Wiman is convinced that writing is a profession in which one never arrives. There is for him an existential resistance to writing however strong his passion. Can he truly navigate this powerful current to write without losing himself in it? He quotes Wendell Berry who says ‘The impeded stream is the one that sings.’ And thus, in the creative process, true poetry tends to emerge from within the poet’s own experience with his unfulfilled longing and striving after perfection. In Wiman’s words, “…A poem is part of a life, even the ones you only read.” Poetic words touch us because they hold forth some aesthetic truth, some revelation that illuminates a need or emptiness. The next logical question is: 'Can there even be aesthetic truth without some other, more ultimate truth as precedent?'
I know it is tempting to think that Wiman is probably some crazed or fanatical Christian waxing lyrical about spiritual truth. I read him closely and was relieved to learn that his faith is clear-sighted and not swallowed up in a haze of holy smoke. Wiman confessed to being quite repulsed by writers who congratulate themselves on being delivered from hell fire. In this book, poets such as Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver and A. R. Ammons wrote poems that touch on the spiritual dimension but they were resistant to God. In fact, Ammons professed not to believe in God. Strangely enough, these modern writers share a common tendency: ‘the art contains and expresses a faith that the artist, in the rest of his waking life, rejects.’ What a paradox!
Some of the loveliest writing can be found in episodes of Wiman’s rare encounters with illustrious poets, especially when he was serving as editor of Poetry magazine. He first met A. R. Ammons in a university lecture hall in which the latter, invited as a guest poet, refused to continue reading his poem. He wrote warmly of meeting Mary Oliver for the first time and feeling surprised to find her inappropriately attired in an oversized hunter jacket with half a dead pigeon in her pocket, which she proffered to Wiman like an offering. He wrote movingly, too, about Craig Arnold, a young poet he came to love and respect, and the loss (upon Arnold's untimely death) not just to him but to the poetic community of that life force that conjured up insightful reflections on the existential issues we all face.
Reading this book has acquainted me with several poems by some of the finest poets I have never read. There is Craig Arnold’s wondrous poem titled ‘Meditation on A Grapefruit’ that must be savored. Another poem Wiman quoted that touched me is ‘Sunlight’, Seamus Heaney’s elegy to his aunt. The most deeply affecting was Philip Larkin’s last poem, ‘Aubade’, whose theme is death. This poem gave me ‘ice in my spine’ as Wiman warned it would, as it continued to chill him even after thirty readings. I read ‘Aubade’ at a carpark while waiting to meet a friend for dinner, and remembered sitting there in stunned silence for a long while, and then inundating my unsuspecting friend with my equally 'spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.' Wiman used ‘Aubade’ to illustrate the faith of art in these words: ‘One of art’s functions is to give form to feelings that would otherwise remain inchoate and corrosive, to give us a means whereby we can inhabit our fears and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessness haunted by them.’
However, Wiman is adamant that art is only a means to an end. Poetry by itself is not enough; art cannot be seen as redemptive. Why?
At 115 pages, Wiman has written a profound and thought-provoking book. His articulate and elegant prose style has a wondrous facility to give expression to thoughts and feelings that struck me as unutterable. I am not sure I understood everything for now. However, I do know that new understanding awaits me when I re-read it at a future point in time.
My heartfelt thanks to Winston who made me a gift of this gem.
October 20, 2018
Good, good stuff. The type of little book you could finish and start over, giving it another go. Here's a more thorough review at my blog, where I'll have more runway for lift-off.... and follow-up in the days to come (where I plan to share some of the poems Wimar shared).
May 5, 2024
There is a fragility to this slender investigation of poetry’s intersection with faith, underscored by the lingering question “what does one want when one cannot stop wanting?” Poet and Yale professor of Divinity Christian Wiman, who served as editor-in-chief of Poetry from 2003 to 2013, reflects on his own reluctant acceptance of mortality as he navigates rare blood cancer. The diagnosis arrives just a year after beginning his tenure at the celebrated journal, when he is falling in love and planning to leave the job that is proving to be too little art and too much bureaucracy. The job interrupts his own artistic endeavors in a way that the cancer diagnosis will interrupt the expected progression of his future, but eventually, without being able to shake either one, he settles into an uneasy acceptance of both (the job, of course, was voluntary but he holds onto it far longer than intended).
Wiman is a believer in Christianity but not necessarily one who holds a biblical worldview. He expresses mild scorn for the typical American Christian, who eagerly recites scripture as a hex against the finality of death, yet he can't quite believe in the atheist either, who posits there is nothing beyond the mortal coil. Poetry, it would seem, as well as the creative process itself, in all its futility and humility, is evidence enough of the grace of faith and proof of life of God.
The chapters explicate poems that have profoundly affected Wiman as a poet and a man exploring his faith. Work by Donald Hall, in whose home Wiman would come to live, by A.R. Ammons, Mark Strand, and Wiman's beloved Seamus Heaney, as well as commercial darling Mary Oliver, of whom the literati love to speak condescendingly and yet Wiman finds himself coming to her defense. Philip Larkin's lament Aubade provides this memoir's cornerstone, in all its grave musing on wretched inevitability of death.
At times, Wiman's own language tripped me up: There are poets who take you to the edge of language, either with words that begin to ease out of their referents (Mallarmé, Mandelstam, Hopkins, Eliot, Crane, Stevens) or with abstractions handled so concretely that you are jolted into an uncanny receptiveness anterior to "belief" or "disbelief" (Dickinson, Wilbur, Eliot again, Stevens again).
Honestly, what does any of that mean? But despite the occasional indulgence in heady poetics jargon, Wiman writes lovingly, conversationally, and quite beautifully of poetry, poets, God, and encounters with his own morality.
In fact, my copy of this book is aswirl with sections underlined and parenthesized in blue highlighter. In reference to Susan Howe’s book That, This he writes
Wiman explores this tension but seems most interested in the tension itself, rather than the resolution of it. Yet, in his investigation of Larkin’s Aubade he concludes this:
This is a book I refer to time and again, for inspiration and for grounding. A beautiful read for anyone contemplating the nature of art and its impact on the soul.
Wiman is a believer in Christianity but not necessarily one who holds a biblical worldview. He expresses mild scorn for the typical American Christian, who eagerly recites scripture as a hex against the finality of death, yet he can't quite believe in the atheist either, who posits there is nothing beyond the mortal coil. Poetry, it would seem, as well as the creative process itself, in all its futility and humility, is evidence enough of the grace of faith and proof of life of God.
The chapters explicate poems that have profoundly affected Wiman as a poet and a man exploring his faith. Work by Donald Hall, in whose home Wiman would come to live, by A.R. Ammons, Mark Strand, and Wiman's beloved Seamus Heaney, as well as commercial darling Mary Oliver, of whom the literati love to speak condescendingly and yet Wiman finds himself coming to her defense. Philip Larkin's lament Aubade provides this memoir's cornerstone, in all its grave musing on wretched inevitability of death.
At times, Wiman's own language tripped me up: There are poets who take you to the edge of language, either with words that begin to ease out of their referents (Mallarmé, Mandelstam, Hopkins, Eliot, Crane, Stevens) or with abstractions handled so concretely that you are jolted into an uncanny receptiveness anterior to "belief" or "disbelief" (Dickinson, Wilbur, Eliot again, Stevens again).
Honestly, what does any of that mean? But despite the occasional indulgence in heady poetics jargon, Wiman writes lovingly, conversationally, and quite beautifully of poetry, poets, God, and encounters with his own morality.
In fact, my copy of this book is aswirl with sections underlined and parenthesized in blue highlighter. In reference to Susan Howe’s book That, This he writes
I read this passage over and over. It still seems to me a fresh and useful description of what poetry (“sound-colored secrets”) can do and why we read and need it (“proof against our fear of emptiness”). It is also a beautiful—and, I think accurate—description of what an experience of God can be and do in our lives… It’s also why poetry is so important in the world, even if few people read it. Its truth is irreducible, inexhaustible, atomic; its existence as natural and necessary as a stand of old-growth trees so far in the Arctic that only an oil company would ever see it…This resonates deeply with me as I experience daily the tension between my desire to create and my sense of inadequacy as a writer, amidst a renewal of my Christian faith.
Wiman explores this tension but seems most interested in the tension itself, rather than the resolution of it. Yet, in his investigation of Larkin’s Aubade he concludes this:
The real issue, for anyone who suffers the silences of God and seeks real redemption, is that art is not enough. Those sorts of time are not enough to hang a life on. At some point you need a universally redemptive activity. You need grace that has nothing to do with your own efforts, for at some point—whether because of disease or despair, exhaustion or loss—you will have no efforts left to make.
This is a book I refer to time and again, for inspiration and for grounding. A beautiful read for anyone contemplating the nature of art and its impact on the soul.
November 12, 2018
Christian Wiman is one of my favorite writers. His prose––and poetry, albeit to a different degree––is both dense and smooth. He writes sentences that start, stop, redirect themselves for words, lines, or even pages at a time, and then somehow end up back where they started, but bring with them a newfound understanding that changes the way Wiman, and his reader, interprets his original thought.
For a book that's barely over a 100 pages, "He Held Radical Light" is a slow and careful read. Wiman packs his prose with so much thought and narrative that to do anything less than a committed, deliberate reading would feel like a disservice to the depth and breadth of Wiman's meanderingly-precise examinations of faith, poetry, art, death, and more.
Maybe that means this book is pretentious––it may very well be––but reading it over the last three weeks has been the closest thing to a "devotional" I've done in years. If you know Wiman's writing at all, then "He Held Radical Light" won't reinvent the wheel; but it will sharpen it. This book could almost act as the thesis statement for all of Wiman's work; it covers all the themes and subjects he values––that I, in turn, value––and his interjecting narratives of his personal life and experiences help create a book that seems to encompass everything Wiman has written about while also asserting that his journey towards understanding, faith, and art is far from over.
If that doesn't make any sense, don't worry, I'm not sure if it makes any sense to me either. What does make sense to me is how much this book touched me, or better yet, *pricked* me, like a pin that draws a bead of blood. It's an honest, raw, and deeply thoughtful analysis of art, its ties to something More, and its effect on those who consume it. I can't recommend it enough.
For a book that's barely over a 100 pages, "He Held Radical Light" is a slow and careful read. Wiman packs his prose with so much thought and narrative that to do anything less than a committed, deliberate reading would feel like a disservice to the depth and breadth of Wiman's meanderingly-precise examinations of faith, poetry, art, death, and more.
Maybe that means this book is pretentious––it may very well be––but reading it over the last three weeks has been the closest thing to a "devotional" I've done in years. If you know Wiman's writing at all, then "He Held Radical Light" won't reinvent the wheel; but it will sharpen it. This book could almost act as the thesis statement for all of Wiman's work; it covers all the themes and subjects he values––that I, in turn, value––and his interjecting narratives of his personal life and experiences help create a book that seems to encompass everything Wiman has written about while also asserting that his journey towards understanding, faith, and art is far from over.
If that doesn't make any sense, don't worry, I'm not sure if it makes any sense to me either. What does make sense to me is how much this book touched me, or better yet, *pricked* me, like a pin that draws a bead of blood. It's an honest, raw, and deeply thoughtful analysis of art, its ties to something More, and its effect on those who consume it. I can't recommend it enough.
December 6, 2018
Not sure if I am becoming less responsive to Wiman's voice, or if my current distractedness is to blame, or whether this slim meditation on POETRY and GOD (or poetry/God - without the and) differed from those I've read previously (My Bright Abyss and pre-Goodreads, Ambition and Survival), but I had to push myself to finish this. Certainly, though, my worldview hasn't changed enough that a passage like this doesn't make me pause:
I have (nearly) always claimed an A-word (either the Ag- or the Ath-, depending on the day and the company). But reading Christian Wiman reminds me to shun easy labels. To define is to defile.
I don't really believe in atheists. Nor in true believers, for that matter. One either lives toward God or not. The word God is of course an abyss, bright or dark depending on the day. But there is no middle ground, no cautious agnosticism in which to settle, no spiritual indifference that is not, even when accompanied by high refinement and exquisite intelligence, torpor. I know the necessity of religion. I know the need for communal ritual and meaningful creeds. And yet I know, too, that all of this emerges from an intuition so original that, in some ultimate sense, to define is to defile. One either lives toward God or not.
I have (nearly) always claimed an A-word (either the Ag- or the Ath-, depending on the day and the company). But reading Christian Wiman reminds me to shun easy labels. To define is to defile.
August 10, 2019
Snarl at me if you will —or call me a philistine— but this book is a piece of candy. Allow me to explain.
Having had faith as a core part of my whole life and identity and, having been someone who reads and writes poetry (I’m not claiming it’s any good), I really appreciate books in this rare niche. Wiman thinks deeply and, like any good (great?) poet, he has a wonderful way with words. I (mostly) read the book in one sitting. I should add that I never read books in a single sitting. Granted, the book is not long, it is very well written. A joy to read. I also, occasionally, take joy in eating candy.
At it’s most obvious moments the book is simply about the poems that have impacted his life: either poems that struck him with a clarity of insight immediately or, how poems have come back to him later in life with a poignancy revealed through the act of living. At it’s most fraught moments, the book is pure poetic verve effortlessly hypnotizing me into ponderous contemplation.
Part philosophy, part poetic pastiche and part memoir. His life, strung together by his career as a poet and editor of Poetry, carries him (and us) through to the poets and their poems; he ties them all together with his thoughts on life, on faith, on poetry. It’s a mixed tapestry woven together with syntactical adeptness.
Basically, I loved this book but it’s not a nourishing piece of soul-wisdom to be cherished (nearly worshipped) like a lot of people think. Wiman has a modern, intellectual mysticism. He raises a lot of deep, meaningful questions and offers a lot of paradoxes as the closest things to truthful answers while simultaneously drawing the reader into an alluring arch of some relevant poem or fascinating anecdote of a poet he once knew; all of which tend to back him up or spur him on. I’m not saying many of life’s truths aren’t paradoxical but the book feels more like an answer than it actually is any sort of answer. I think Wiman would agree with me: “Indeed, the key to reading a writer like [Simone] Weil is much the same as the key to reading poetry. You can’t let the flashes of insight harden into knowledge.”
In He Held Radical Light, Wiman comes across a lot like Weil; not to mention he is already a poet. Thus, his warning is self-reflective. Don’t let this book harden into knowledge. It is experiential. Grab a cup of coffee and drink it in. Savor the taste of the words and the way he crafts and molds them in new ways to allow you to see “flashes of insight” —lightning apprehension of life, faith and poetry— but don’t try to hold onto the brightness of that flash.
Ultimately, sometimes vitamins are sugar coated. This book is a chewy little gummy. It’s also, coincidently, a chewy little vitamin. Taste it. Enjoy it. Swallow it. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re healthy now.
Having had faith as a core part of my whole life and identity and, having been someone who reads and writes poetry (I’m not claiming it’s any good), I really appreciate books in this rare niche. Wiman thinks deeply and, like any good (great?) poet, he has a wonderful way with words. I (mostly) read the book in one sitting. I should add that I never read books in a single sitting. Granted, the book is not long, it is very well written. A joy to read. I also, occasionally, take joy in eating candy.
At it’s most obvious moments the book is simply about the poems that have impacted his life: either poems that struck him with a clarity of insight immediately or, how poems have come back to him later in life with a poignancy revealed through the act of living. At it’s most fraught moments, the book is pure poetic verve effortlessly hypnotizing me into ponderous contemplation.
Part philosophy, part poetic pastiche and part memoir. His life, strung together by his career as a poet and editor of Poetry, carries him (and us) through to the poets and their poems; he ties them all together with his thoughts on life, on faith, on poetry. It’s a mixed tapestry woven together with syntactical adeptness.
Basically, I loved this book but it’s not a nourishing piece of soul-wisdom to be cherished (nearly worshipped) like a lot of people think. Wiman has a modern, intellectual mysticism. He raises a lot of deep, meaningful questions and offers a lot of paradoxes as the closest things to truthful answers while simultaneously drawing the reader into an alluring arch of some relevant poem or fascinating anecdote of a poet he once knew; all of which tend to back him up or spur him on. I’m not saying many of life’s truths aren’t paradoxical but the book feels more like an answer than it actually is any sort of answer. I think Wiman would agree with me: “Indeed, the key to reading a writer like [Simone] Weil is much the same as the key to reading poetry. You can’t let the flashes of insight harden into knowledge.”
In He Held Radical Light, Wiman comes across a lot like Weil; not to mention he is already a poet. Thus, his warning is self-reflective. Don’t let this book harden into knowledge. It is experiential. Grab a cup of coffee and drink it in. Savor the taste of the words and the way he crafts and molds them in new ways to allow you to see “flashes of insight” —lightning apprehension of life, faith and poetry— but don’t try to hold onto the brightness of that flash.
Ultimately, sometimes vitamins are sugar coated. This book is a chewy little gummy. It’s also, coincidently, a chewy little vitamin. Taste it. Enjoy it. Swallow it. But don’t fool yourself into thinking you’re healthy now.
April 17, 2024
What more can be said about the well-covered topics of death, faith and art? The words have become trite simply because they are so traditional, but Christian Wiman's memoir, a combination of personal essay and poetic exegesis, offers a unique salve for these deepest existential agonies. Recalling his time as editor of Poetry, his treatment for lymphatic cancer, his interactions with leading poets (Donald Hall, Seamus Heaney), Wiman meditates on his motivation for writing at all. He remembers when Donald Hall once turned him to at lunch and said, "I was thirty-eight when I realized that not a word I wrote was going to last"—a quotation that distills the ethic of the book. Gone is the pompous hubris of classical poetry (like Theognis imagining his poetry living on "in the tongues of men" or Horace describing his verse as "a monument more lasting than bronze"); gone are the confident certitudes of the Romantic poet as the seer of human experience. Wiman's memoir paints a more modern, more doubt-ridden picture of a life of faith and art. For Wiman, faith is not dogmatic credulity; it is a faithfulness to a past faith, always holding in memory some past experience of beauty, some glimpse of the sublime. Wiman doesn't find comfort in a heaven or a hell—spiritual fulfilment comes not from seeking, not from trying to believe in these things, but in "living toward God", a great abyss of light and darkness. For Wiman, poetry is not a spiritual alternative to prayer or redemption. In his youth, he thought he might write a brilliant poem that would endure forever but he disclaims this youthful arrogance—art is not meant to serve ambition; art is not a means of posthumous survival.
Faith and art are not comforts for death and there is something comforting in that. Faith is not meant to inure us to the inevitability of death and poetry will never confer personal immortality. I found something liberating in Wiman's self-doubts and self-questioning. The point of poetry isn't to "versify the self" but to more deeply express the soul. Yet for all this, Wiman doesn't offer some definitive advice or thesis in this book. Even defining faith and art is an elusive goal ("to define is to defile", he says). He is wary of "wisdom hardening into knowledge". He is afraid of "sounding wise". What his memoir shows is a liberating openness to the void, a willingness to accept the Sisyphean drama of human life and all its precarity—and there is no one answer or one definition for all readers.
Faith and art are not comforts for death and there is something comforting in that. Faith is not meant to inure us to the inevitability of death and poetry will never confer personal immortality. I found something liberating in Wiman's self-doubts and self-questioning. The point of poetry isn't to "versify the self" but to more deeply express the soul. Yet for all this, Wiman doesn't offer some definitive advice or thesis in this book. Even defining faith and art is an elusive goal ("to define is to defile", he says). He is wary of "wisdom hardening into knowledge". He is afraid of "sounding wise". What his memoir shows is a liberating openness to the void, a willingness to accept the Sisyphean drama of human life and all its precarity—and there is no one answer or one definition for all readers.
February 27, 2019
Beautiful, clear; a quick meditation on how poets reckon with their chief obsessions of death, faith, and art. Wiman has a graceful humility and deep-seated wisdom that seem rare among many of his compatriots.
February 16, 2020
I finished this book bathed in light. Hurtling toward home at 30,000 feet above the middle of America after two weeks of traveling speaking about my own book, I resisted the pull to productivity and settled into the sun of Wiman’s wanderings through both his career and modern American poetry.
I’ve been asking questions about the cost of creativity, like Wiman asked early in his career: “Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself in it?” Describing the limitless love of God while feeling the limits of my body, maturity, and bank account can feel both like darkness and dawn; this is a new season of my vocation, and past my wanting for more and better, I want to be well, to be me, to be present.
This book left me aware of the sun on my face, the warmth of welcoming where I am. I enter this new season of my vocation as a writer with intensity, but also, bathed in the light of willingness to witness the world as I am.
I’ve been asking questions about the cost of creativity, like Wiman asked early in his career: “Can I navigate this strong current, and can I remain myself while losing myself in it?” Describing the limitless love of God while feeling the limits of my body, maturity, and bank account can feel both like darkness and dawn; this is a new season of my vocation, and past my wanting for more and better, I want to be well, to be me, to be present.
This book left me aware of the sun on my face, the warmth of welcoming where I am. I enter this new season of my vocation as a writer with intensity, but also, bathed in the light of willingness to witness the world as I am.
October 6, 2022
What do you say about a book that's totally scalding and leaves you feeling raw and vulnerable? What should I feel about a book that takes the two subjects I know best in the world (Christian theology and English poetry) and makes me realize that I'm a total amateur in each?
Here are some quotes:
I don't mean to sound mystical, except inasmuch as there is a persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence, which art both derives from and sustains.
...there is no middle ground, no cautious agnosticism in which to settle, no spiritual indifference that is not, even when accompanied by high refinement and exquisite intelligence, torpor. I know the necessity of religion. I know we need communal ritual and meaningful creeds. And yet I know, too, that all of this emerges from an intuition so original that, in some ultimate sense, to define is to defile. One either lives toward God or not.
...to assert and to assent at the same time, to bow down to the original energy to which one also stakes a claim.
Everything in you must bow down. If not to God, then to the goddamned fact of existing at all, "the million-petaled flower of being here"...
I think this book did good things to me, though probably more to my guts than to my intellect. (Eliot would approve the poet aiming for the organs.)
Here are some quotes:
I don't mean to sound mystical, except inasmuch as there is a persistent, insistent mystery at the center of our existence, which art both derives from and sustains.
...there is no middle ground, no cautious agnosticism in which to settle, no spiritual indifference that is not, even when accompanied by high refinement and exquisite intelligence, torpor. I know the necessity of religion. I know we need communal ritual and meaningful creeds. And yet I know, too, that all of this emerges from an intuition so original that, in some ultimate sense, to define is to defile. One either lives toward God or not.
...to assert and to assent at the same time, to bow down to the original energy to which one also stakes a claim.
Everything in you must bow down. If not to God, then to the goddamned fact of existing at all, "the million-petaled flower of being here"...
I think this book did good things to me, though probably more to my guts than to my intellect. (Eliot would approve the poet aiming for the organs.)
November 21, 2024
Wiman, a poet, uses as an epigraph a quote from Juan Jiminez:
The world does not need to come from a god
For better or worse, the world is here. But it
does need to go to to one (where is he?) and that
is why the poet exists.
In a sense, a “god”, a state of some kind of transcendence is what art, particularly poetry aspires to, and the connections between the particular and the universal is what Wiman explores. It’s a thoughtful and challenging exploration, certainly not an abstruse academic exercise. Wiman uses examples of contemporary poetry to clarify his thought, and his comments on the poems m are interesting in themselves.
Wiman mentions that he is now teaching at a divinity school where many of his students are preparing for the ministry He tries to engage them in looking at he border between religion and art. To show a human, irreligious, in despair, he uses a poem, “Aubade”, for example, by Philip Larkin about the meaninglessness of religion, that “vast moth-eaten brocade/ created to pretend we never die . . .” And yet, this poem as an act of creation, one that has structure and form, is a tribute to something of value, of meaning, even though its subject is apparent meaninglessness. So to think about art is also to inevitably think about religion ,both providing types of meaning that strive toward the transcendent.
Another example is from a late Wallace Stevens poem, “The Planet On the Table” in which Stevens writes of the sun that fosters both growth and decay and analogously, poems that are created and yet have no guaranteed permanence,. The sun and the poem are intuitively united. In a similar process. The poem is a statement of a “spiritual” reward in writing. Not an easy concept to grasp, but this is at the heart of what Wiman is getting at. For a human being to create something is a spiritual act, a striving after the transcendent. A paradox – as Archibald MacLeish put it, “They also live who swerve and vanish in the river. . .”
The title comes from a poem by A. R. Ammons, “. . . he held radical light in his brain as music in his skull, music turned . . .” Again there is the merging of totally different sensations, light and sound, but they come together and fuse inside a human’s consciousness. A metaphorical way of expressing, again, the convergence of the universal and the particular.
This book is in many ways a followup to Wiman’s earlier MY BRIGHT ABYSS in which he wrestled with religious belief, not a set of intellectual statements, but an ongoing struggle for a faith that engages both our emotions and our intellects. Here, the emphasis is more an engagement with the secular, an approach to poetry and art, separate from religion, but still edging toward its concerns.
10-24
I reread this work five years later and wrote another review, without looking at my first one. To my mild surprise, I mostly repeted myself:
The subtitle for this book is “The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art,” and it opens with a memory of the poet, A. R. Ammons, of whom Wiman writes that his poems are often flavorless rambling, but occasionally “lit up suddenly by a meteoric masterpiece.” That is the method of this book, a mixing of personal experience and commentary on poetry, and its connection with religion as both strive for, not just meaning, but an intensive meaning which often comes in bursts of insight.
Wiman is most interested in the areas where religion and poetry merge in their search for meaning. Wiman uses as an epigraph, a quotation from Juan Jemenez. “The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?), and that is why the poet exists.” That suggests that while a formal belief in God is not necessary to live in a world, some kind of meaning is always sought after, and that is the role of the poet – to create this meaning.
Wiman uses plenty of examples and for me this was the most satisfying part of the book. His reading of poems always wrestles with how they give meaning. He contends that many modern poets, and artists of all kinds, express a faith in their art that often uses religious language that goes unrecognized. Of course, that brings up the question of what is “religious” language?
One of his most striking examples is Phillip Larkin’s “Aubade” which seems to be about the meaninglessness of life and the horror of the nothingness of death, and how religion has tried unsuccessfully to overcome these states of mind. Yet, Larkin’s poem uses words in such a way that they are meaningful. An “aubade” is a traditional hymn of praise to the morning, and it is not used in any cheapened ironical way. It celebrates, if that’s the word, how humans get through their days, and in this creation of words, carefully chosen with counerpointing rhymes, it could be argued that Larkin’s poem is not one of despair, but of hope, complicated as it might be.
In the end, Wiman is suggesting that in a world where God is silent, poetry is a form of redemptive activity. Traditionally, God created something from nothing, and in a infinitesimally small way, poets participate in this way by creating verbal s”omethings” from what could be mistaken for ordinary “nothingness.”
A final example. To return to where these comments started, while not mentioned by Wiman, I think of A. R. Ammons’ long and impressive poem, “Garbage” which finds signficance in material that we discard and never think of again.
The world does not need to come from a god
For better or worse, the world is here. But it
does need to go to to one (where is he?) and that
is why the poet exists.
In a sense, a “god”, a state of some kind of transcendence is what art, particularly poetry aspires to, and the connections between the particular and the universal is what Wiman explores. It’s a thoughtful and challenging exploration, certainly not an abstruse academic exercise. Wiman uses examples of contemporary poetry to clarify his thought, and his comments on the poems m are interesting in themselves.
Wiman mentions that he is now teaching at a divinity school where many of his students are preparing for the ministry He tries to engage them in looking at he border between religion and art. To show a human, irreligious, in despair, he uses a poem, “Aubade”, for example, by Philip Larkin about the meaninglessness of religion, that “vast moth-eaten brocade/ created to pretend we never die . . .” And yet, this poem as an act of creation, one that has structure and form, is a tribute to something of value, of meaning, even though its subject is apparent meaninglessness. So to think about art is also to inevitably think about religion ,both providing types of meaning that strive toward the transcendent.
Another example is from a late Wallace Stevens poem, “The Planet On the Table” in which Stevens writes of the sun that fosters both growth and decay and analogously, poems that are created and yet have no guaranteed permanence,. The sun and the poem are intuitively united. In a similar process. The poem is a statement of a “spiritual” reward in writing. Not an easy concept to grasp, but this is at the heart of what Wiman is getting at. For a human being to create something is a spiritual act, a striving after the transcendent. A paradox – as Archibald MacLeish put it, “They also live who swerve and vanish in the river. . .”
The title comes from a poem by A. R. Ammons, “. . . he held radical light in his brain as music in his skull, music turned . . .” Again there is the merging of totally different sensations, light and sound, but they come together and fuse inside a human’s consciousness. A metaphorical way of expressing, again, the convergence of the universal and the particular.
This book is in many ways a followup to Wiman’s earlier MY BRIGHT ABYSS in which he wrestled with religious belief, not a set of intellectual statements, but an ongoing struggle for a faith that engages both our emotions and our intellects. Here, the emphasis is more an engagement with the secular, an approach to poetry and art, separate from religion, but still edging toward its concerns.
10-24
I reread this work five years later and wrote another review, without looking at my first one. To my mild surprise, I mostly repeted myself:
The subtitle for this book is “The Art of Faith, The Faith of Art,” and it opens with a memory of the poet, A. R. Ammons, of whom Wiman writes that his poems are often flavorless rambling, but occasionally “lit up suddenly by a meteoric masterpiece.” That is the method of this book, a mixing of personal experience and commentary on poetry, and its connection with religion as both strive for, not just meaning, but an intensive meaning which often comes in bursts of insight.
Wiman is most interested in the areas where religion and poetry merge in their search for meaning. Wiman uses as an epigraph, a quotation from Juan Jemenez. “The world does not need to come from a god. For better or worse, the world is here. But it does need to go to one (where is he?), and that is why the poet exists.” That suggests that while a formal belief in God is not necessary to live in a world, some kind of meaning is always sought after, and that is the role of the poet – to create this meaning.
Wiman uses plenty of examples and for me this was the most satisfying part of the book. His reading of poems always wrestles with how they give meaning. He contends that many modern poets, and artists of all kinds, express a faith in their art that often uses religious language that goes unrecognized. Of course, that brings up the question of what is “religious” language?
One of his most striking examples is Phillip Larkin’s “Aubade” which seems to be about the meaninglessness of life and the horror of the nothingness of death, and how religion has tried unsuccessfully to overcome these states of mind. Yet, Larkin’s poem uses words in such a way that they are meaningful. An “aubade” is a traditional hymn of praise to the morning, and it is not used in any cheapened ironical way. It celebrates, if that’s the word, how humans get through their days, and in this creation of words, carefully chosen with counerpointing rhymes, it could be argued that Larkin’s poem is not one of despair, but of hope, complicated as it might be.
In the end, Wiman is suggesting that in a world where God is silent, poetry is a form of redemptive activity. Traditionally, God created something from nothing, and in a infinitesimally small way, poets participate in this way by creating verbal s”omethings” from what could be mistaken for ordinary “nothingness.”
A final example. To return to where these comments started, while not mentioned by Wiman, I think of A. R. Ammons’ long and impressive poem, “Garbage” which finds signficance in material that we discard and never think of again.
January 4, 2024
This is the kind of book a philosophy major would claim is their favorite when in reality they fell asleep reading it. An interesting take on faith that I don’t necessarily agree with (and truth be told was oftentimes beyond my comprehension), but one that contains some nuggets of wisdom nonetheless.
June 2, 2025
Phenomenal. At one point in this book, Wiman says the key to reading a particular author is, “You can’t let the flashes of insight harden into ‘knowledge.’” I think this is the secret to reading Wiman/poets/poetry in general. Wiman and his ilk don’t write like sunlight but lightening—not that illuminating but much hotter than the sun. Which is to say, the writing here is insane. The concepts are bigger than you could possibly wrap your mind around. And the poems are so so good. Wiman’s anecdotes are also just wild and perfect. Really looking forward to keep reading him.
June 27, 2025
Christian Wiman has became one of my favorite all-time authors after reading his 3 memoir/essay collections in the last year or so. Unintentionally I read them out of publication order, but have hit certainly into different parts of my life as I read them. This is his shortest of the 3, mostly centering on his exploration of art and how art is driven by "what we want when we can't stop wanting", which is his way of intuiting divine presence and how that translates into some form of faith. He is a poet primarily and a poetry scholar, so all of his books are heavily laced with quotations of his favorite poets. I would likely not recommend this if you haven't already read My Bright Abyss, his first memoir, and perhaps the most important book on faith in the 21st century. I say that in all seriousness. His writings of faith through pain--and, in this one, how they lead to art-- lead one to a sense of friendship and community with other faith seekers despite intense pain.
I think it is best summarized by this idea I have thought about nearly daily since I read it: Wiman speaks of his opinion on why so many find themselves suddenly with a belief in God when faced with imminent death. For him, that was his rare extremely painful cancer diagnosis, which also lends each book he writes with the urgency that it may be his last. He believes that this phenomenon of belief in the face of death is not due to a fear of the afterlife, but because in the face of death all the urgencies and noises of life fade away, and for possibly the first time in your life, you are deeply quiet in your soul. And it is there in the quiet of your soul that God's gentle, still, small voice rests, and for the first time, you hear God's tenderness and have an undeniable mystical experience of sorts. I've attached myself to this idea and see it in everywhere I go now, in every person and every noise.
I think it is best summarized by this idea I have thought about nearly daily since I read it: Wiman speaks of his opinion on why so many find themselves suddenly with a belief in God when faced with imminent death. For him, that was his rare extremely painful cancer diagnosis, which also lends each book he writes with the urgency that it may be his last. He believes that this phenomenon of belief in the face of death is not due to a fear of the afterlife, but because in the face of death all the urgencies and noises of life fade away, and for possibly the first time in your life, you are deeply quiet in your soul. And it is there in the quiet of your soul that God's gentle, still, small voice rests, and for the first time, you hear God's tenderness and have an undeniable mystical experience of sorts. I've attached myself to this idea and see it in everywhere I go now, in every person and every noise.
July 12, 2019
This book is characteristic of Wiman: intensely thoughtful, deeply insightful, and seriously poetic. It made me simultaneously want to write poetry/make art and terrified of trying. This isn't an easy book to read, as he mingles stories and poems and thoughts, and his writing makes you work to understand but is really rewarding. That being said, he's so so smart and reading his thoughts on poetry, art, creativity, and faith was amazing.
This book isn't about the relationship between faith and art in any definite way. And while Wiman is a bit more universalist than other Christian writers, he isn't really concerned with clearly delineating between art and faith. He spends more time showing how the two intersect and interact and feed each other. It's great.
This book isn't about the relationship between faith and art in any definite way. And while Wiman is a bit more universalist than other Christian writers, he isn't really concerned with clearly delineating between art and faith. He spends more time showing how the two intersect and interact and feed each other. It's great.
January 30, 2019
I read this one at just the right time, and it spoke soothingly to some questions and little anxieties that have been clawing around in my head recently. Still grappling with the main idea of the book—that truth can only be perceived and felt when we recognize its elusive and fleeting nature. That seems like a paradox to me, but maybe a true one, especially when it comes to art.
December 1, 2018
I came looking for the sweetness of Christ in verse and got only the bitterness of mainline Christendom in epitath. They long ago decided honey was too fantastic to be real and would rather exalt images resembling mortal man, birds, animals and creeping things. There is no sense of the best of Jonathan Edwards, which is what poetry ought to be - to taste the sweetness of God, bitterness of sin, nearness of eternity. Those in love with orthodoxy will choke while chewing this book. Or they ought to anyhow.
January 25, 2022
Wiman's previous book, My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer, features some of my all-time favorite writing on faith, so the expectations were high going into this...and not necessarily met. I felt underwhelmed comparing the two, but after pausing to try considering this on its own accord, I have to credit it for still being a beautiful little book of sharp and stirring insight. Whereas the former was primarily a meditation on faith by a poet, this is mostly a reflection on poetry by a person of faith. And, of course, Wiman's faith is particular, complicated, and searing; he is a modern mystic for whom poetry seems to often by the only language capable of transcending the apophatic, and so fittingly he is also inclined towards poets that are not overt in their belief –and even overt in their disbelief– of a transcendent.
My biggest complaint against the book (which could be more so a reflection of my own failings as a reader) is that at the end and all the way through, I struggled to articulate the specific point(s) Wiman was making. Obviously this is a "love letter to poetry" as the blurb describes before it's anything else, but it's also certainly something else. Probably a meditation on the way that reality is elusive, with a fleeting perceptability, and that poetry and faith are simultaneously means of glimpsing it and refractions of that notion in and of themselves. (Maybe feeling like I can't fully grasp the point was the point, then?) And yet, my pages are marked up with underlinings and margin notes –– I was often moved by the reflections here and certainly the language, even if they're proving a bit evanescent for me. I think that experience would be a lot more frustrating with a longer book; the conciseness here serves Wiman well.
It was also a clever move to orient nearly all of his reflections around the work of poets he had personal encounters with. This helped give focus to the sort of meandering ideas, and grounded the philosophical musings with stories of surprisingly stark clarity in contrast. The anecdote about Mary Oliver alone just about made the entire book feel worth it, and I was surprised to find myself near tears at the end of the chapter describing Craig Arnold, a poet I'd never heard of but who Wiman described so vividly and lovingly that his tragic end really choked me up. Ultimately, I'm definitely glad to have read this (honestly I'm excited to add it to my bookshelf for the cover alone), but I'm hopeful that Wiman will write more material with a clearer focus on faith again –– his perspective and articulation is both unique and intimately resonant for me.
My biggest complaint against the book (which could be more so a reflection of my own failings as a reader) is that at the end and all the way through, I struggled to articulate the specific point(s) Wiman was making. Obviously this is a "love letter to poetry" as the blurb describes before it's anything else, but it's also certainly something else. Probably a meditation on the way that reality is elusive, with a fleeting perceptability, and that poetry and faith are simultaneously means of glimpsing it and refractions of that notion in and of themselves. (Maybe feeling like I can't fully grasp the point was the point, then?) And yet, my pages are marked up with underlinings and margin notes –– I was often moved by the reflections here and certainly the language, even if they're proving a bit evanescent for me. I think that experience would be a lot more frustrating with a longer book; the conciseness here serves Wiman well.
It was also a clever move to orient nearly all of his reflections around the work of poets he had personal encounters with. This helped give focus to the sort of meandering ideas, and grounded the philosophical musings with stories of surprisingly stark clarity in contrast. The anecdote about Mary Oliver alone just about made the entire book feel worth it, and I was surprised to find myself near tears at the end of the chapter describing Craig Arnold, a poet I'd never heard of but who Wiman described so vividly and lovingly that his tragic end really choked me up. Ultimately, I'm definitely glad to have read this (honestly I'm excited to add it to my bookshelf for the cover alone), but I'm hopeful that Wiman will write more material with a clearer focus on faith again –– his perspective and articulation is both unique and intimately resonant for me.
Read
January 17, 2024None like Wiman, that’s for sure. He writes with an almost brutal intensity and honesty that’s also somehow gentle and comforting? Which I guess really means he’s telling the truth. And the truth, as we know, is often difficult to confront, claim, and swallow, but all the more liberating to know. This is all sounding so general when Wiman is anything but that—he’s painstakingly particular. In fact, I believe that’s how he arrives at the universal—his devotion to the particular leads him to the throne of truth, and we as his readers, approach, often trembling yet grateful and satisfied. (Griffin told me this is a Hegelian idea ¯\_(ツ)_/¯)
“This is why a poet's technical decisions are moral decisions, why matters of form and sound have existential meaning and consequences. It's also why poetry is so important in the world, even if few people read it. Its truth is irreducible, inexhaustible, atomic; its existence as natural and necessary as a stand of old-growth trees so far in the Arctic that only an oil company would ever see it; and just like those threatened trees, its reality ramifies into the lives of people for whom it remains utterly irrelevant and / or obscure. The same may be said for other arcane ways of facing God. ‘Sorrows have been passed,’ as Howe concludes in that passage above,
‘and unknown continents approached.’”
“Or perhaps: that the notion of disorder would be naive? That we might be a form, or part of a form, whose fruition, for now, we can intuit but not inhabit-that heaven and oblivion might have one name, which every poet, in one way or another, is trying to speak.”
“One of art's functions is to give form to feelings that would otherwise remain inchoate and corrosive, to give us a means whereby we can inhabit our fears and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”
“It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.”
“God is present wherever genuine love is present, or perhaps more accurately, God, who is omnipresent but often experienced as absence, is made available through the expression of genuine love. The life of God and the life of humans are-for this one time and in this one way-one thing. This doesn't mean that some form of shared human love is necessary for revelation. God comes to the loveless and the loneliest among us, as the whole histories of art and faith attest. But perhaps love is necessary for revelation to remain revelation.”
“This is why a poet's technical decisions are moral decisions, why matters of form and sound have existential meaning and consequences. It's also why poetry is so important in the world, even if few people read it. Its truth is irreducible, inexhaustible, atomic; its existence as natural and necessary as a stand of old-growth trees so far in the Arctic that only an oil company would ever see it; and just like those threatened trees, its reality ramifies into the lives of people for whom it remains utterly irrelevant and / or obscure. The same may be said for other arcane ways of facing God. ‘Sorrows have been passed,’ as Howe concludes in that passage above,
‘and unknown continents approached.’”
“Or perhaps: that the notion of disorder would be naive? That we might be a form, or part of a form, whose fruition, for now, we can intuit but not inhabit-that heaven and oblivion might have one name, which every poet, in one way or another, is trying to speak.”
“One of art's functions is to give form to feelings that would otherwise remain inchoate and corrosive, to give us a means whereby we can inhabit our fears and pains rather than they us, to help us live with our losses rather than being permanently and helplessly haunted by them.”
“It has been my experience that faith, like art, is most available when I cease to seek it, cease even to believe in it, perhaps, if by belief one means that busy attentiveness, that purposeful modern consciousness that knows its object.”
“God is present wherever genuine love is present, or perhaps more accurately, God, who is omnipresent but often experienced as absence, is made available through the expression of genuine love. The life of God and the life of humans are-for this one time and in this one way-one thing. This doesn't mean that some form of shared human love is necessary for revelation. God comes to the loveless and the loneliest among us, as the whole histories of art and faith attest. But perhaps love is necessary for revelation to remain revelation.”
November 8, 2025
“What is it we want when we can’t stop wanting?” This question haunts the poet, the artist, the earnest seeker—and it forms the restless heart of Christian Wiman’s He Held Radical Light. In this luminous reckoning of poetry as faith and faith as poetry, Wiman offers few consolations, yet gestures toward those rare intersections where language expands and opens onto the sacred. Poetry, he reminds us, can only ever be a means, never the end itself.
Wiman writes, “But after all this, what I know is that poetry [vocation] is not enough, and to make it an end rather than a means is not simply a hopeless enterprise but a very dangerous one. ‘Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.’ Yet it’s not that simple. For the paradox…is that with art…you must act as if the act itself were enough…You must spend everything on nothing, so to speak, if nothing is ever to stir for and in you…And for all those revelations, a certain ‘sacred weakness,’ as Maritain calls it, is key.”
Wiman writes, “But after all this, what I know is that poetry [vocation] is not enough, and to make it an end rather than a means is not simply a hopeless enterprise but a very dangerous one. ‘Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied.’ Yet it’s not that simple. For the paradox…is that with art…you must act as if the act itself were enough…You must spend everything on nothing, so to speak, if nothing is ever to stir for and in you…And for all those revelations, a certain ‘sacred weakness,’ as Maritain calls it, is key.”
October 9, 2018
4 1/2
Tackles faith, meaning, etc etc but specifically through the lens of poetry, yet could appeal to casual fans of poetry or the poetry-averse but literate-minded due to the memoirist's contextualization of verse. Wonderfully lithe, benefiting from an off-the-cuff conversational feel rather than a fully-wrought treatise. He Held Radical Light works best as that rare and pleasantly surprising incongruity - an ontological trifle.
Tackles faith, meaning, etc etc but specifically through the lens of poetry, yet could appeal to casual fans of poetry or the poetry-averse but literate-minded due to the memoirist's contextualization of verse. Wonderfully lithe, benefiting from an off-the-cuff conversational feel rather than a fully-wrought treatise. He Held Radical Light works best as that rare and pleasantly surprising incongruity - an ontological trifle.
Read
June 23, 2020I’m not sure how to review this book. I enjoyed it very much, and will be returning to it often, though I can’t put a finger on exactly why.
Reading it was like having coffee and pastries with an old friend in their favorite coffee shop (to which you’ve never been), and the only thing on your agenda for the day is catching up and eating jelly-filled donuts.
Just like coffee and donuts, I think this book is best consumed early in the morning, just as the sun is rising over the horizon.
Reading it was like having coffee and pastries with an old friend in their favorite coffee shop (to which you’ve never been), and the only thing on your agenda for the day is catching up and eating jelly-filled donuts.
Just like coffee and donuts, I think this book is best consumed early in the morning, just as the sun is rising over the horizon.
April 30, 2021
My review in 3 or more words: reflective | lyrical | absorbing
A gorgeous reflection on poetry, faith, and friendships within the poetry community, focusing on mortality and what we can understand about individual poet’s faith by mining their lines as well as their interactions with Wiman in his own life of faith and suffering and poetry.
A gorgeous reflection on poetry, faith, and friendships within the poetry community, focusing on mortality and what we can understand about individual poet’s faith by mining their lines as well as their interactions with Wiman in his own life of faith and suffering and poetry.
October 25, 2018
Wiman reflects on the role of art in life as he looks back on his encounters with poets and poems over the course of his adult life. Beautifully written, as is usual with Wiman. There is much to reflect upon here.
March 14, 2020
"Understand that there is a beast within you / that can drink till it is / sick, but cannot drink till it is satisfied."
January 10, 2021
Lean and yet rich. “Noctilucent”: night-shining. I hope I will remember this book on my shelves and pick it up again in a few years and again and again.
July 14, 2022
Enjoyable though quite dense and will likely require a re-read.
January 30, 2023
2023.15: A gem that challenges head and heart and soul. Do I race to the end or linger on each page, every word?
July 19, 2023
“What is it that we want when we can’t stop wanting?”
Wiman consistently articulates thoughts my feelings, my gut, my intuition haven’t quite arrived at but have been craving.
Wiman consistently articulates thoughts my feelings, my gut, my intuition haven’t quite arrived at but have been craving.
January 12, 2019
Wiman's latest is one of the most elegant books I've read. His poetry is beautiful and his prose about poetry is brilliant.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 114 reviews