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Abstract
The book ends with a comparative coda, turning from poetry of the English Reformation to a memoir by a modern poet, Christian Wiman. In My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer (2013), Wiman recounts a thoroughly modern dilemma in terms Calvin would appreciate. What does it mean to be a believer, in the modern world? For Wiman, answering this question requires reconciling the creativity he values as a poet with the belief he craves as a man facing death. Like Calvin, he thinks that prideful self-reliance is an ever-present temptation, and like Calvin, Wiman suspects that composing poetry distracts from devotion to God and affirms the need for a shift from self-absorption to devotion, from a deluded sense of independence to a sustaining faith. Unlike the poets explored in this book, however, all influenced to varying degrees by Calvinism, Wiman’s account of his problem as well as his solution is distorted by a notion of belief peculiar to modern societies. Wiman associates belief with propositional claims and cognitive assent, as a mirror image of scientific or rational knowledge. Nevertheless, the memoir reveals that the poetics of belief he ultimately affirms actually redefines belief as a form of poetic relationality.
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