The Bible and Poetry

A fresh, provocative look at the link between poetry and Christianity, both as it relates to the Bible itself as well as to Christian and religious life, by an accomplished scholar.

The Bible is full of poems. It includes the Psalms and the Song of Songs of course, but poetry also plays an immense part in the Prophets and shows up in the books of the Old Testament. The New Testament, for its part, reverberates with allusions to the poetry of the Old Testament and concludes with Revelation, a visionary poem, while Jesus, seeking to open his listener’s eyes to the kingdom of heaven, describes it with the poetic epithet of “a treasure hid in a field,” while the son of God is the “true vine,” “the light of the world,” “the good shepherd,” “the way, the truth, and the life.” The Bible, in other words, asks to be read poetically throughout, and yet readers have rarely considered the implications of that, much less heeded its call.

In The Bible and Poetry, the poet and scholar Michael Edwards seeks to transform how the Bible and Christianity are understood, arguing that poetry is not an ornamental or accidental feature of the Bible but is central to its meaning. The creative use of words that is poetry is the necessary medium of the Creator’s word, and belief emerges not from precepts and propositions but out of the lived experience—this is what the Bible offers above of all—of the power of that word.

Michael Edwards is an Anglo-French poet and scholar. Born in Barnes, London, he is the author of twenty books and the first English person ever to have been elected to the Collège de France and to the Académie Francaise. 
 
Stephen E. Lewis is a professor of English at Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and a translator of French literature.