Christian poetry

Passages such as Philippians 2:5-11 (following) are thought by many Biblical scholars to represent early Christian hymns that were being quoted by the Apostle: A fuller appreciation of the formal literary virtues of Biblical poetry remained unavailable for European Christians until 1754, when Robert Lowth (later made a bishop in the Church of England), kinder to the Hebrew language than his own, published Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, which identified parallelism as the chief rhetorical device within Hebrew poetry.

Other Christian poems of the Late Roman Empire, such as the Psychomachia of Prudentius, cut back on allusions to Greek mythology, but continue the use of inherited classical forms.

The hymnodist Venantius Fortunatus wrote a number of important poems that are still used in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Vexilla Regis ("The Royal Standard") and Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis ("Sing, O my tongue, of the glorious struggle").

From a literary and linguistic viewpoint, these hymns represent important innovations; they turn away from Greek prosody and instead seem to have been based on the rhythmic marching songs of the Roman legions.

Even during the 20th-century, after hearing Sean-nós singer Joe Heaney’s first public performance in Dublin of a famous work of oral poetry in the Irish language about the Crucifixion of Jesus and the grief of His Blessed Mother from the Connemara oral tradition, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, a highly important figure to Modern literature in Irish, wrote, "In Caoineadh na dtrí Muire he brings home to us the joys and sorrows of Mary with the intimacy and poignancy of a Fra Angelico painting.

Since its 18th-century rediscovery in a 15th-century monastic manuscript from Yaroslavl and 1800 publication by Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, The Lay, which is often compared with both The Song of Roland and the Finnish Kalevala, has inspired many other poems, art, and, in Classical music, the opera Prince Igor by Mighty Handful composer Alexander Borodin.

As this was during the Gutenberg Revolution, these books were mass-produced and gave impetus to the Renaissance, but also caused many intellectuals, writers, and poets to embrace a nostalgia for Classical mythology and an antipathy for Christianity.

In 1535, Marco Girolamo Vida, a Bishop of the Catholic Church in Italy and Renaissance Humanist, published the Christiad, an epic poem in six cantos about the life and mission of Jesus Christ, which is modeled upon the poetry of Virgil and was written at the request of Pope Leo X.

Furthermore, according to Kirkconnell, Vida's, "description of the Council in Hell, addressed by Lucifer, in Book I", was, "a feature later to be copied", by Torquato Tasso, Abraham Cowley, and by John Milton in Paradise Lost.

[5] Marko Marulić, a Croatian lawyer and Renaissance Humanist, defied the usual practice of Christian epic poetry at the time by choosing to retell stories from the Old Testament instead of the New.

In 1517, Marulic finished writing the Davidiad an epic poem in Virgilian Latin in 14 books, which retells the life of King David, whom Marulić depicts, in keeping with Catholic doctrine, as a prototype for Jesus Christ.

The late Serbian-American philologist Miroslav Marcovich also detected, "the influence of Ovid, Lucan, and Statius" in the work, with is replete with learned allusions to Greek and Roman mythology.

This was because, according to his translator Edward Mulholland, in a very common viewpoint for the time, "For Marulic, as Elisabeth von Erdmann points out, pagan myth and poetry gained a certain legitimacy when employed in the service of theology.

The linguistic basis of the book is Split Čakavian speech and the Štokavian lexis, and the Glagolitic original of the legend; the work thus foreshadows the unity of Croatian language.

This means that as a consequence of the Counter-Reformation, and especially of the judgments and rulings of the Council of Trent, the secular Italianate forms and themes brought into Spain by Garcilasco were used by subsequent writers to explore moral, spiritual, and religious topics.

In response to La Ceppède's frequent comparisons of Jesus Christ to figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the Bishop wrote, "[I am] drawn by that learned piety which so happily makes you transform the Pagan Muses into Christian ones.

[19] According to Christopher Blum, "The Theorems is not only poetry, it is a splendid work of erudition, as each sonnet is provided with a commentary linking it to Scriptural and Patristic sources and, especially, to the Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas.

As La Ceppède put it in his introduction—which can be read in Keith Bosley’s admirable translation of seventy of the sonnets—the harlot Lady Poetry had been unstitched of 'her worldly habits' and shorn of her 'idolatrous, lying and lascivious hair' by the 'two-edged razor of profound meditation on the Passion and death of our Saviour.

As the strict censorship in England made it impossible for him to legally publish his poems, Southwell circulated them clandestinely, in a 16th century version of the samizdat literature that followed the Bolshevik Revolution.

But the vanity of men cannot counterpease the authority of God, Who delivering many parts of the scripture in verse, and by His Apostle willing us to exercise our devotion in hymns and spiritual sonnets warranteth the art to be good and the use allowable.

Christ Himself, by making a hymn the conclusion of His Last Supper and the prologue to the first pageant of His Passion gave His Spouse a method to imitate, as in the office of the Church it appeareth and all men a pattern to know this measured and footed style.

For in lieu of solemn and devout matter, to which in duty they owe their abilities, they now busy themselves in expressing such passions as only serve for testimonies to how unworthy affections they have wedded their Wiles.

And because the best the best course to let them see the error of their works is to weave a new web in their own loom; I have here laid a few coarse threads together to invite some skillfuller wits to go forward in the same or to begin some finer piece wherein it may be seen, how well verse and virtue suit together.

[23] During the Reformation in Wales, Queen Elizabeth I of England commanded that Welsh poets be examined and licensed by officials of the Crown, who had alleged that those whom they considered genuine Bards were, "much discouraged to travail in the exercise and practice of their knowledge and also not a little hindered in their living and preferments.

Although Edwards has compared the unlicensed Bards of the era with, "today's abusers of the Social Security system," [25] historian Philip Caraman quotes a 1575 "Report on Wales" that reveals an additional reason for the decree.

For example, as a reader and great admirer of Scholastic theologians Saint Thomas Aquinas and Francisco Suárez, Calderón liked to confront reason against emotion, intellect against instinct, and understanding against the will.

According to Russian Symbolist poet and dramatic theorist Vyacheslav Ivanov, "Let us take a look at drama, which in modern history has replaced the spectacles of universal and holy events as reflected in miniature and purely signifying forms on the stages of the mystery plays.

In 1704, when The Philippines was still the capital of the Spanish East Indies, Gaspar Aquino de Belén authored the Pasyon: a famous work of narrative poetry in the Tagalog language about the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus.

K. R. Srinivasa Iyengar wrote that "The Gospel-story is retained in essentials, but... the sonority of Sanskrit gives a fresh morning splendour and resonance to Jesus' divine ministry.

When asked by William Baer about his decision to write Christian poetry, English-American New Formalist Frederick Turner said, "In the 20th century, it became more and more frowned on to advertise your religious views.