Transformations

Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry
by Peter Steele
John Leonard Press, 2012, 250 pages, $34.95

There is a long tradition in English literature of the priest-poet. It begins more or less with John Skelton, who, on the eve of the Reformation, managed simultaneously to satirise while embodying much that the Reformation would seek to dislodge in English Christianity. An anti-clerical poet, Skelton enjoyed the privileges of the clerical class. A priest who flouted the laws of clerical celibacy by taking a wife and proudly fathering a child while continuing to serve as a priest, he was as far from the modern idea of the pious priest as it is possible to imagine. And yet he was capable of great piety and priestly devotion.

Skelton belongs very much to the pre-Reformation Catholic Church in England. His was a Christianity at ease with the body, in which, for example, a bride would vow before God not only to “have and to hold” her husband in sickness and in health, but also to be “bonnie and buxom in bed”, as the Sarum Rite of Marriage puts it. Skelton knew nothing of the “dissociation of sensibility”, as Eliot described it, which emerged in the wake of the Reformation. Nor, it must be said, did he know the devotional heights that would be reached by George Herbert, perhaps the ideal example of the English priest-poet after the Reformation.

John Donne, George Herbert, Robert Herrick and Thomas Traherne are the leading examples of the priest-poet in the seventeenth century. Simply to invoke them is to suggest the variety of the tradition they represent, one that has narrowed, sadly, in the ensuing centuries. It is difficult to imagine a modern priest, Anglican or Roman Catholic, writing a celebration of the nipples of a woman’s breasts, as Herrick did; or, as Donne did, comparing the church, positively, to a loose woman “Who is most true and pleasing to thee then / When she is embraced and open to most men.”

If the tradition of priest-poet has narrowed over the centuries in some respects, its rigours have nevertheless shaped at least two major poets, namely Gerard Manley Hopkins and R.S. Thomas. And then there are the minor if notable voices, including the outgoing Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, and the Jesuit poets, Peter Levi, sometime Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and the late Fr Peter Steele, the Australian essayist and academic.

The dominance of Jesuits in the list of Roman Catholic priest-poets is noteworthy. Peter Steele, however, as he explains in his posthumously published collection of essays, Braiding the Voices: Essays in Poetry, always bridled at the idea that “he wrote under the sign of Hopkins” and resisted the notion that he was “part of some Hopkins Club of the Society of Jesus”. He nevertheless acknowledges that Hopkins, at least occasionally, provides some of his poetry’s DNA, and he writes insightfully of Hopkins at different points throughout this collection, especially in the essay “Poetry’s Fugitives: A Christian Hearing”. In the process, Steele attractively brings together his various voices as priest, poet, teacher and scholar—which he braids, in turn, with those acquired through his other vocation as a wide and close reader: the voices of poets, philosophers, theologians, literary critics, journalists and more.

The opening essay of the volume, “Stealing Poseidon’s Trident”, concerns itself with the art of reading:

Meanings interleave and overlap and sleek their currents through one another, making climates of their own. Going with some zest into reading is like going down to the sea in ships.

He urges the importance of both close reading and impulsive reading. On the one hand (and here Steele’s famed gifts as a teacher emerge), we should go

dutifully from one small, well-made sentence in which the cat sat on the mat and kept its mouth shut, to larger quarters in which one clause [leads] guardedly into another before the patient gaze.

On the other hand, Steele believes that “we do not learn to love reading simply by being courtly: we have to do some courting as well, and that is usually all the better for some impulsiveness”. Close reading is all very well, but so is voracious, indulgent, passionate reading.

Steele displays both qualities in the opening essay, which ranges unselfconsciously from Elias Canetti, to S.J. Perelman, Chesterton, Swift, Milton, Auden and Alfred North Whitehead. Reading should, ideally, both expand our understanding and humble us at the same time. Even the simplest recorded facts can transform us: “What could be better than to read, of our battered planet’s early fortunes, that it once rained for millions of years?” Indeed.

In a later essay, “The Muse at Mass: Glossing Two Worlds”, Steele suggests a parallel between the art of criticism and the “kind of Bible commentary which came into fashion during the first half of the twelfth century—the ‘Glossa Ordinaria’”, in which the text of the Bible and the commentary on it were written in parallel, so that the reader could refer from one to the other, while recognising the primacy of the biblical text. “By analogy with this practice, one may see much philosophical, theological, and creative writing as being gloss-like upon primary texts.” In a sense, this is what Steele does in many of the essays included here. His commentary always displays a love and reverence for the text that he, like a medieval scribe, illuminates.

Steele’s approach to criticism is informed by what is now often described, after Hans Urs von Balthasar, as a theological aesthetic. He sees the Eucharist as “that poem of poems”, “a festival of that truth” in which “we are ourselves made ‘strange but true’ insofar as we answer that presence”. The Eucharist “resists simplifying accounts” and thus points to the mysteriousness and hence inexhaustible value of all things. For Steele, the Mass is in essence a matter of transformation, not only of the Eucharistic elements themselves but, as importantly, of those who receive them.

The analogy between the efficaciousness of the Eucharist and poetry is not a new one—John Keble compared poetry to sacraments in the nineteenth century, as did Jacques Maritain and David Jones in the twentieth—but Steele’s elaboration of the analogy adds much to the conversation, especially in the emphasis he gives to the importance of beauty in the sacraments and in art. The writer who has had most influence on Steele’s thought in this respect is the Eastern Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart, whose The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (2003) is the most quoted work in the volume. Clearly, Steele remained an avid reader of contemporary theology to the very end.

But it is contemporary poetry that dominates the book. There are two fine essays on Peter Porter, and one each on Seamus Heaney, Les Murray and Vincent Buckley, but the highlight for me is the essay “The Solitudes of Anthony Hecht”. It is a mark of the finest literary criticism that it inspires us to return to the poetry it glosses, and Steele’s readings of Hecht’s “Still Life” and “Devotions of a Painter” had me urgently searching my shelves for Hecht’s Collected Poems.

The volume concludes with six of Steele’s final poems. Their inclusion is reasonable enough, but if I have one criticism to make of the book as a whole it is that far too many of the essays are devoted to Steele’s own poetry. One or two essays of this kind would have sufficed. It is not that the author fails to reveal interesting insights into the process of making a poem; rather, it is that too often the apparent calculations entailed in crafting a poem overwhelm the finished product.

But—and Steele has some important things to say of the word but which, he says, “has been of incalculable importance to human understanding”—this is a lively, engaging and often moving collection of essays. It is also, at times, very funny—as when Steele describes a cartoon depicting the Virgin Mary remonstrating with her son dressed in the costume of the Infant Jesus of Prague: “I don’t care who you are; you’re not going to school dressed like that”—showing again that Catholics can laugh even at the things they hold most sacred.

Fr Steele will no doubt be remembered as a devoted priest and scholar, a good poet and an excellent essayist. This book is a fitting way to sign off. Requiescat in pace!