A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art

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As more and more people in North America and Europe have distanced themselves from mainstream religious traditions over the past centuries, a � crisis of faith” has emerged and garnered much attention. But Glenn Hughes, author of A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art, contends that despite the withering popularity of faith-based worldviews, our times do not evince a decline in spirituality. One need only consider the search for � alternative� religious symbolisms, as well as the growth of groups espousing fundamentalist religious viewpoints, to recognize that spiritual concerns remain a vibrant part of life in Western culture.

 � �  �  �   � Hughes offers the idea that the modern ��crisis of faith � is not a matter of vanishing spiritual concerns and energy but rather of their disorientation, even as they remain pervasive forces in human affairs. And because art is the most effective medium for spiritually evocation, it is our most significant touchstone for examining this spiritual disorientation, just as it remains a primary source of inspiration for spiritual experience.

A More Beautiful Question is concerned with how art, and especially poetry, functions as a vehicle of spiritual expression in today� �s modern cultures. The book considers the meeting points of art, poetry, religion, and philosophy, in part through examining the treatments of consciousness, transcendence, and art in the writings of twentieth-century philosophers Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan. A major portion of A More Beautiful Question is devoted to detailed � �case studies” of three influential modern poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and T. S. Eliot. In these and its other chapters, the book examines the human need for artistic symbols that evoke the mystery of transcendence, the ways in which poetry and art illuminate the spiritual meanings of freedom, and the benefits of an individual� s loving study of great literature and art.

A More Beautiful Question has a distinctive aim �to clarify the spiritual functions of art and poetry in relation to contemporary confusion about transcendent reality� �and it meets that goal in a manner accessible by the layperson as well as the scholar. By examining how the best art and poetry address our need for spiritual orientation, this book makes a valuable contribution to the philosophies of art, literature, and religion, and brings deserved attention to the significance of the � �spiritual” in the study of these disciplines.

A More Beautiful Question: The Spiritual in Poetry and Art Review

I am spellbound at how 'lightly' Glenn Hughes leads the reader through such a wonderful metaphysical maze of some of the most difficult poetry in English. Perhaps because he's also a published poet as well as a philosopher, he combines both skills. I can't think when I've enjoyed reading a book in philosophy of literature more. Weaving Wordsworth's `Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood' into his reflections on childhood epiphanies, he indicates how our early childhood experiences have a rich imaginative depth in some ways equivalent to the overarching intuitions of myth. He points out how art can recover those intimations of transcendence in a world where they're continually being overlaid or downright assaulted by more pragmatic considerations. Effortlessly drawing on two rather different philosophers, Eric Voegelin and Bernard Lonergan, to my surprise he shows how their insights into art complement each other. Voegelin writes how the work of art somehow creates an image of the whole world (my own preferred example here would be the apparently limited `world' of Giorgio Morandi's still life paintings), while Lonergan explores how art frees us from the narrow requirements of mere survival, opening us out to the joy of experiencing colour, sound, movement, space, words, for their own sake. In this study, Hughes concentrates on poetry, given literary art's capacity to yield `the most nuanced and existentially precise articulations of the experiences, difficulties and insights involved in living out a conscious relationship to transcendent meaning.' (6) He quotes Ezra Pound on artists as `the antennae of the race,' and finds such antennae in three poets who are responding to some of the deepest questings of the human spirit in that crucial century that left the 19th century behind. The book launches into a careful but exuberant study of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets. But it's far more than a critical reading of some of their texts. Given the difference in stance, particularly of the non-religiously affiliated Emily Dickinson and the other two poets, in fact Hughes is writing to readers who themselves have experienced the confusions and loss of light that can strangely be found clearly in Hopkins as much as Dickinson. In his reading, the spiritual sinewiness of Eliot is more than matched by the hope against hope courage of Dickinson. The last chapter, on `Art and Spiritual Growth' is an invitation to the reader to take her or his own journey of exploration, a journey lightened and lighted rather than weighed down by the active inner and outward imaginative explorations of self and history of his three authors. His quotation from E. E. Cummings on his experience of every true work of art explains the title of the book: `Always the beautiful answer who asks a more beautiful question.' Hughes' book for me asked that more beautiful question. His work came across to me as an indispensable exploration in applied aesthetics. It's essential reading for both literary critics and philosophers.

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