Showing papers by "Rowan Williams published in 1977"

Poetic and Religious Imagination

Abstract: Thus W. H.Auden, in his poem on the death of Yeats. And, as Hannah Arendt emphasizes,' there is obviously no question here of the poet praising the best of all possible worlds, congratulating the Creator on a highly satisfactory performance. Poetry it seems is not grounded in some celebratory sense of being at home in the world, but rather in the acute awareness of the world not being at home in itself, in a sense of dislocation. It is never the business of art to say, This is good, or (the corollary of that) I am good; only to say, This is, and, I am. Hence what Eric Gill aptly called the 'lover's quarrel' between art and 'prudence' or moral sensibility; art may be about world-views, even metaphysics, yet it is fundamentally inimical to ideology of any kind. The serious artist should easily comprehend the passion with which Job turns away from the neat, facile explanations, solutions and evaluations which his comforters import into his disordered experience. The brutal and overwhelming monologue which Yahweh addresses to Job and his friends is essentially a long statement of the utter alienness and inaccessibility of the order of the world to the mind of man, the impossibility of an ordered linguistic picture of it. If there are things which God alone sees (,Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?') how can speech about them ever be possible?The morning stars and the sons of God who stand at the creator's side are entitled to their shouts of joy at the world; but man is not so graced. Can you draw out leviathan with a hook? can you harness the monsters? Then the