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The Sanctification of Literature
- Abstract
I SOMETIMES find myself wondering at which point in the history of modernity secular literature, in particular poetry, became elevated into the realm of sanctity. Nathan A. Scott, Jr., writes (in The Wild Prayer of Longing) that it is the poet-he means Theodore Roethke-who provides a new possibility of “conceiving the world to be a truly sacramental reality.” Heidegger had said the same of Holderlin: his poetry was “a temple without a shrine” and his mission was “to name the holy.” Speaking of the “transcendent scene” enacted between Cordelia and King Lear in the fourth act of Shakespeare’s play, G. Wilson Knight adds, “From the travail of nature the immortal thing is born; time has given birth to that which is timeless.” We recall Carlyle’s claim that Shakespeare was the priest of “the Universal Church of the Future and of all times.” These are particularly rapturous comments, but more sober critics often say the same kind of thing. James Baird (in Ishmael) tells us that Moby Dick is “the supreme example of the artistic creator engaged in the act of making new symbols to replace the ‘lost’ symbols of Protestant Christianity.”
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