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The Mystery of It All Paul Mariani Praise for THE MYSTERY OF IT ALL “To read the never prosaic, always poetic, prose of Paul Mariani’s The Mystery of It All is to feel called to action and then guided by a voice at once both lovingly personal and yet passionately prophetic, the voice of not just an intellectual but also a spiritual father. Readers, writers, teachers, and editors of literature informed by the Catholic intellectual tradition will find some of the most beautiful passages from centuries of great works of literature—that Mariani reminds us have become ‘fragments shored against . ruins’ and wants us to ‘piece together’ into ‘a complex, exciting, reworked, and re-vivifying mosaic,’ remembering to preserve ‘that sense of awe and wonder’ in the presence of the ‘incomprehensible certainty’ of the Mystery that ‘continues to beckon and burn.’” —MARY ANN B. MILLER, professor of English, Caldwell University; founding editor, Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry “A profound tour de force, combining the passions of a great and generous literary mind with the self-interrogations of a pilgrim. I have long admired Paul Mariani’s extraordinary ability to engage and empathetically enter the interior lives of the poets he studies; his accomplishment and capacious scope is exemplary of what we have come to call the Catholic imagination, an imagination that demonstrates how each substantive voice serves to continue and to enhance the essential utterances of many.” —SCOTT CAIRNS, author of Slow Pilgrim: The Collected Poems and Anaphora: New Poems “Acclaimed as a biographer and poet, Paul Mariani is also revered as an exciting, learned, passionate teacher. There’s no better place to get a sense of those combined talents than in this wonderful collection of essays.” —RON HANSEN, author of Mariette in Ecstasy and Atticus “ The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 1 6/12/19 4:40 PM “The preeminent literary biographer of our age, Paul Mariani eloquently explores the ways the mystery of the spiritual ‘beckons and burns’ in the life and works of a host of modern poets. Viewing these poets through a sacramental vision, Mariani eloquently establishes that they did not abandon or try to disparage faith but expressed it through the quotidian, looking for the sacred—the real—embedded in the ordinary. Drawing upon a lifetime immersed in studying theology, Mariani does not neglect the overarching influence of classical Christianity on these poets, showing how St. Francis influenced Hopkins or how St. Paul or Dante surface in so many of these poets’ canons. In his opening and closing chapters, Mariani writes his own autobiography, his Apologia Pro Vita Sua. The Mystery of It All is nothing short of Mariani’s Summa, a must read for anyone who claims to be knowledgeable about modern poetry and its inescapable roots in, and indebtedness to, the spiritual.” —PHILIP C. KOLIN, Distinguished Professor of English, Emeritus, University of Southern Mississippi, Hattiesburg “At its heart of this new book is the mystery of mysteries, what is beyond language, and yet what Mariani has been honoring and attending to his entire life. Hopkins, the muse of the book, calls it ‘the grandeur of God’ that shines in all things: ‘electrical, alive, ever-present, like a living river of The Vocation of crisp, fresh air.’ Mariani is a witness to this higher love, our paraclete, our Poetry in the Twilight companion.” —PHILIP METRES, author of The Sound of Listening: Poetry as Refuge and Resistance of Modernity “Mariani’s lifelong love of language pervades the volume, as this modern-day Virgil guides the pilgrim/reader along a journey through the great tradition of Western literature as seen through the lens of the Judeo-Christian imagination. Mariani’s journey becomes our journey, his story our story, one he tells with grace, beauty, and passion.” —ANGELA ALAIMO O’DONNELL, author of Still Pilgrim: Poems and The Province of Joy: Praying with Flannery O’Connor “Catholic poetry has a storied history, but its present is under much debate. Mariani has the rare critical gift to be both informative and inspiring, to offer a call for contemporary readers and writers to mine the world of faith, to look ‘hard at things until you are at last convinced that they have revealed a glimmer of the phosphorescent truth they so often seem to cover and contain.’ An expansive book that offers both wisdom and hope.” —NICK RIPATRAZONE, culture editor for Image journal, and author of This Darksome Burn, a novel The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 2 6/12/19 4:40 PM THE MYSTERY OF IT ALL The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity PAUL MARIANI Paraclete Press BREWSTER, MASSACHUSETTS The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 3 6/12/19 4:40 PM 2019 First Printing The Mystery of It All: The Vocation of Poetry in the Twilight of Modernity Copyright © 2019 by Paul Mariani ISBN 978-1-64060-333-2 All Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™ Scripture quotations marked NJB are taken from The New Jerusalem Bible, copyright © by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Used by permission. The Paraclete Press name and logo (dove on cross) are trademarks of Paraclete Press, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mariani, Paul L., author. Title: The mystery of it all : the vocation of poetry in the twilight of modernity / Paul Mariani. Description: Brewster, Massachusetts : Paraclete Press, [2019] Identifiers: LCCN 2019020729 | ISBN 9781640603332 (tradepaper) Subjects: LCSH: Religious poetry, American--History and criticism. | Christian poetry, American--History and criticism. | Christianity and literature--United States--History. | Catholics--United States--Intellectual life. | Modernism (Literature)--United States. Classification: LCC PS310.R4 M37 2019 | DDC 811.009/3823--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019020729 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in an electronic retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Paraclete Press Brewster, Massachusetts www.paracletepress.com Printed in the United States of America The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 4 6/12/19 4:40 PM FOR EILEEN Moon, old moon, dear moon, I beg you answer me when I call out to you, as I have from the eerie hospital bed, or over the lit dashboard of my car, or from the north room where my love is sleeping now, here next to me, as she has for fifty years and more, constant companion, ancient moon, as we go silvering on, alleluia. The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 5 6/12/19 4:40 PM The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 6 6/12/19 4:40 PM CONTENTS PREFACE 9 INTRODUCTION THE VOCATION OF THE CATHOLIC POET TODAY 15 I ON THE QUIVER OF MYSTERY 35 GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS AND HIS INFLUENCE 1. HOPKINS AND THE POETICS OF JESUIT SPIRITUALITY 37 2. THE HAVOC AND THE GLORY 72 3. THE FRANCISCAN HEARTS OF HOPKINS AND MERTON 86 4. “THE ONE SANE MILKMAN, I FEAR” 94 5. THE DUBLIN NOTEBOOK 122 6. WHEN POETS WRITE LETTERS 128 7. WHAT THE WORLD CAN TELL US 135 II IN ORDINARY TIME 139 VARIATIONS ON A THEME IN MODERN AMERICAN POETRY 8. WALLACE STEVENS, MYSTERY MAN 141 9. THE AURORAS OF AUTUMN 148 10. THE RIVER OF LANGUAGE 154 11. “NOT LESS THAN EVERYTHING” 161 12. DIFFICULT HENRY AND THE DREAM SONGS 171 13. WHAT LIES BEYOND LANGUAGE 178 POETRY IN A POST-CHRISTIAN AGE 185 III 14. CHARISM AND THE LITERARY IMAGINATION 187 15. “WHO IS THAT ON THE OTHER SIDE OF YOU?” 201 16. THE CRY OF THE POOR 206 17. IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF IGNATIUS 211 18. CAN ONE STILL WRITE A CHRIST-CENTERED POETRY? 216 EPILOGUE ON THE WORK STILL TO BE DONE 225 NOTES 233 The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 7 6/12/19 4:40 PM The poem of the mind in the act of finding What will suffice. It has to be living, to learn the speech of the place. It has to face the men of the time and to meet The women of the time. It has to think about war And it has to find what will suffice. WALLACE STEVENS, “Of Modern Poetry”1 Oh how I wished to see our image fuse With the Divine Circle and find its place in it, But my own wings were far too weak for that. And then, like that, my mind was struck by lightning, And with this light received what it had asked. Here words failed my high imagination. But by now my desire and will were already Moving, like a wheel revolving uniformly By the Love that moves the sun and other stars. 2 DANTE, Paradiso, c. XXXIII The Mystery of It All_FORMAT .indd 8 6/12/19 4:40 PM PREFACE ike others, I have spent the better part of my life in pursuit of words that might answer my deepest longings for self-realization. L And now, as I approach eighty and watch my friends dying or winding up in hospitals and hospices, I ask myself, once again: Am I any closer to a final resolution? There are moments when I lie in bed in the dark, my CPAP strapped to my face, trying to pray for clarity as I wait to drift off once more, wondering if I will awake tomorrow morning, and—if I do—what then? Where do I pick up and continue? Because I think of myself as a wordsmith, the way my father thought of himself as a mechanic, and because I have only one good ear and so have always had to pay more attention to words than many, words have always been foremost for me, especially words that signify, that chime, that somehow capture a glimmer of something within or below or above the quotidian.
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