Les Murray and Marian Poetry

When I was doing research for my book on representations of the Virgin Mary in English poetry (See the Virgin Blest, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), looking at numerous poets over the centuries, I made a couple of discoveries that surprised me. The first was the wide range of poets, from different religious traditions, who had written about Mary; and the second was the conspicuously small number of poems devoted to Mary from poets of pronounced Catholic persuasion, whether Roman or Anglican, in the corpus of their works. Writers such as John Donne, George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, for example, have only a few poems each, specifically about her.

Another surprising fact in this domain—which, in this case I was already aware of—is that one of the more prolific and inventive writers about the Virgin Mary in the long history of poetry in English is the Puritan, John Milton, giving the lie to the idea that Protestants regard the Mother of God dismissively as a deceased Roman…