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Finding the World's Fullness: On Poetry, Metaphor, and Mystery
Forty years as a poet has kept Robert Cording looking at the details of everyday experience. That long labor has brought him face-to-face with the inescapable complexity of a world that is full of suffering and injustice. And grace.
This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, “poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire.” Cording’s task has therefore been to evoke what he calls “the primordial intuitions of Christianity”: that we live in a world we did not create; that God’s immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot “taste and see” that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it.
The reflections in Finding the World’s Fullness —comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz—suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, “The world’s fullness is not made but found.”
This journey has convinced him that, as Czeslaw Milosz puts it, “poetry embodies the double life of our common human circumstance as beings in between the dust that we are and the divinity to which we would aspire.” Cording’s task has therefore been to evoke what he calls “the primordial intuitions of Christianity”: that we live in a world we did not create; that God’s immanent presence is capable of breaking in on us at every moment; that most of the time we cannot “taste and see” that presence because we live in a world of mirrors; that only by attention can we live in the world but outside of our existing conceptions of it.
The reflections in Finding the World’s Fullness —comprising not only thoughts on metaphor but also close readings of poets ancient and modern, including George Herbert, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Bishop, and Stanley Kunitz—suggest that, as Richard Wilbur puts it, “The world’s fullness is not made but found.”
164 pages, Paperback
Published November 7, 2019
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September 2, 2020
Overview
Finding the World’s Fullness is a deceptively dense little book, packed with a host of quotes from some of the world’s greatest poets and thinkers, that sets out to make a simple point—how poetry is a way to find the world’s fullness. The book never tires repeating, and revisiting from various perspectives, that the world is an astonishing place, and the simple fact that it is, when it need not be, is possibly the most astonishing thing of all. The world is made, and it is a mystery; it is a work that calls forth wonder. Poetry is a way of capturing and expressing that wonder, while never exhausting it or domesticating its mystery.
Cording quotes Czeslaw Milosz in the preface to set the tone of his book and layout one of the basic tenets of his approach to poetry:
Format
All the chapters unpack this basic insight, employing numerous guides and presenting various exemplars who embody it. The amount of material alone that Cording interacts with is impressive. The book feels like a guided tour of a gothic cathedral, with plenty of stops to point out and explain the beauty and significance of every stained-glass window or strange relic.
Cording partners us with a such guides as: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, and George Herbert. Some of the significant stops along the way include: a row of oak trees dropping their acorns, a Van Gogh painting of shoes, a newly created Eve gazing on her own reflection, and a moose stepping out of the night woods onto the road before a bus.
Cording takes us into the world of Hamlet coming to terms with unruly reality, Jacob wrestling at night with the unnamed One, Abraham’s baffling journey to sacrifice, Job’s confrontation with the voice in the whirlwind, Jesus pausing to write in the dirt, a girl in a waiting room disoriented by the limits of her knowledge, and a man looking out on a lake after the death of his wife.
In helping us find the world’s fullness, Cording overwhelms us with an artistic and literary fullness along the way.
Summary
Cording explains the aim of his book like this:
If you are looking for a book on what poetry is all about and that draws upon a theological view of creation and grace and wonder, this is a great place to start!
Here is a selection of 20 quotes from the book.
Finding the World’s Fullness is a deceptively dense little book, packed with a host of quotes from some of the world’s greatest poets and thinkers, that sets out to make a simple point—how poetry is a way to find the world’s fullness. The book never tires repeating, and revisiting from various perspectives, that the world is an astonishing place, and the simple fact that it is, when it need not be, is possibly the most astonishing thing of all. The world is made, and it is a mystery; it is a work that calls forth wonder. Poetry is a way of capturing and expressing that wonder, while never exhausting it or domesticating its mystery.
Cording quotes Czeslaw Milosz in the preface to set the tone of his book and layout one of the basic tenets of his approach to poetry:
"When a thing is truly seen, seen intensely, it remains with us forever and astonishes us, even though it would appear there is nothing astonishing about it."
Format
All the chapters unpack this basic insight, employing numerous guides and presenting various exemplars who embody it. The amount of material alone that Cording interacts with is impressive. The book feels like a guided tour of a gothic cathedral, with plenty of stops to point out and explain the beauty and significance of every stained-glass window or strange relic.
Cording partners us with a such guides as: Czeslaw Milosz, Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, John Ruskin, and George Herbert. Some of the significant stops along the way include: a row of oak trees dropping their acorns, a Van Gogh painting of shoes, a newly created Eve gazing on her own reflection, and a moose stepping out of the night woods onto the road before a bus.
Cording takes us into the world of Hamlet coming to terms with unruly reality, Jacob wrestling at night with the unnamed One, Abraham’s baffling journey to sacrifice, Job’s confrontation with the voice in the whirlwind, Jesus pausing to write in the dirt, a girl in a waiting room disoriented by the limits of her knowledge, and a man looking out on a lake after the death of his wife.
In helping us find the world’s fullness, Cording overwhelms us with an artistic and literary fullness along the way.
Summary
Cording explains the aim of his book like this:
"My aim here has been to sketch a rationale for poetry that tries to take into account a world we did not make, being faithful to that essential mystery… I look at how our attention to the concrete particulars of ordinary experience can bring us back, again and again, to the fundamental experience of being: that there is something rather than nothing." (ix-x)
If you are looking for a book on what poetry is all about and that draws upon a theological view of creation and grace and wonder, this is a great place to start!
Here is a selection of 20 quotes from the book.
Displaying 1 of 1 review