1. When I first looked through Newman’s Collected Poems, and found myself contemplating Gerontius purely as a literary text for the first time, I was stunned. I had no idea it was so well written. It seemed to me far superior to N’s other verse (almost as if I came across Goethe’s Faust in the midst of a volume of Ella Wheeler Wilcox). In fact, I’d almost suggest it might be the best-written thing he ever did, even better than his prose (in which I always find a Pater-like streak of pose & artificiality & self-regarding in the mirror).
2. Why the bad reputation then? I’d say every century tends to reject the art of its predecessor. The 18th century rejected the Metaphysicals; the 19th rejected Dryden & Pope; the 20th rejected the Victorian poets, and we’re still trying to recover our balance from that. Even Tennyson hasn’t quite regained his reputation; and not only Gerontius, but lots of other first-rate 19th-cent poems are still under a cloud. Think of Southey’s dazzlingly inventive epics, Thomas Moore’s satires, Hartley Coleridge, Isaac Williams, Charles Tennyson Turner…. But the whirligig of time will presumably bring in its revenges. It always does.
3. As for theology… well, if we start discarding things on the ground that we object to their theology, we’ll throw out the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Aeneid and the Divine Comedy and the Comédie humaine and Faust and Anna Karenina and Hamlet and Macbeth…. Will any literature be left?
Personally, I like sitting quietly at the feet of wise people from other times & places every now & then… not arguing with them, just listening to what they say. Yes, their beliefs are different from mine. But I don’t necessarily feel confident that I’m right and they’re wrong. Sometimes, in fact, they ultimately persuade me of the opposite!
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Len Mullenger - Founder of MusicWeb