Trafficking in the Radiant: The Spiritualization of American Poetry

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2005 by Sadoff, Ira

Sartre posits that because our lives are finite, every choice matters: we are without consolation or excuse. Those who believe this current readjustment, this shifting lens and movement toward spirituality, has served us well may feel more comfortable with this change than I do. But for those of us who identify with "Free-thinking Jews" or who believe that the world on earth is effluvial, filled with goodness as well as darkness, sufficient beauty and difficulty, for whom contingency offers the pleasure of discovery as well as a threat to stability, we're "still insatiable . . . still looking for a form, for a language to express the world."

NOTES

1. "Fear and Favor," Nicholas Lehman, New Yorker, 2/14-21/05, p. 176.

2. http://www.thearda.com/arda.asp

3. www.poems.com/threewil.htm. It should be noted thatWilbur's poems employ wider-ranging strategies: I'm interested here in what elements of Wilbur's poems form the celebration of his work.

4. DiPiero, Brother Fire (Knopf, 2004).

5. Scarry, The Body in Pain (Chapter 3). http://www. ufobreakfast.com/archive/00000075.htm

6. Rudman, American Poetry Review (Sept./Oct. 2004).

7. Eliot, Christianity and Culture, p. 10 (1948; rpt. San Diego: Harcourt, 1988). The remark was made in 1938, at a time when it was known that Jews were-to put it mildly-being exiled and exported from German culture.

8. Eliot, lecture at the University of Virginia, 1933; printed in After Strange Cods (1934); withdrawn after that.

9. Introduction, The Criterion (April, 1932).

10. Eliot, Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1952), p. 473.

11. Yancy, "T. S. Eliot's Christian Society: Still Relevant Today?" http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle. asp?title=io76.

12. Freud, The Future of an Illusion, p. 146. http://www6i. homepage.villanova.edu/kevin.hughes/documents/ sigmund_freud.htm

13. Freud, Totem and Taboo, http://www.faithnet.org.uk/ Science/Psychology/freudreligion.htm

14. Halvorson, Peter L. Atlas of Religious Change in America, 1952-3990. Atlanta, GA: Glenmary Research Center, 1994.

15. www.marxists.org/reference/ archive/sartre/works/ exist/sartre.htm

IRA SADOFF'S most recent book is Barter (Illinois, 2003). He teaches in the MFA program of New England College and Colby College.