ON POETRY AND POETS
JOHN HENRY NEWMAN AND THE ENGLISH POETS
I Introduction
This essay traces Saint John Henry Newman’s encounters, intellectual, moral, spiritual and literary, with the poets of the English tradition, from medieval poets to the Victorian poets of his own day, and it explores his influence on two Catholic poets of the twentieth century. A poet himself, his widest influence over his generation was through his prose works. His prose, too, can claim to have a poetic quality in its structure and its cadence.
Newman (1801-1890) read the classical poets throughout his life. His education and early career were built on a foundation of Greek and Latin literature. Newman had a particular affection for Virgil. He particularly admired the Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues. He wrote a panegyric to Virgil in 1858, describing him as the “Prince of Latin poets” and noting a “Romantic” sensibility in his work.
He frequently recalled Homer’s works, referring to the Iliad and the Odyssey, in his lectures on literature and education. He was a lover of Greek tragedy and the historians Thucydides and Herodotus. He even wrote poems in Latin and occasionally in Greek. Newman did not read these poets for leisure only; he integrated them into his philosophy of education. In The Idea of a University (1873), he mused that “perusal of the poets, historians, and philosophers of Greece and Rome” was essential to refine and enrich the intellect. Classical literature was a “manifestation of human nature in human language” and served as a vital bridge to understanding the Church Fathers and Christian history. In his essay “Poetry with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics” (1829), Newman contrasts different types of poetic “charm.” The greatest poets do not rely on clever plots or flowery diction, but on a certain rugged, spiritual intensity.
In The Idea of a University Newman proposes that a national literature is a reflection of a nation’s soul. He acknowledges that English literature is inherently “Protestant” in its later developments, referring to Milton and others, but he points to Chaucer as the great exception, primary evidence that English literature began with a Catholic heartbeat.
Newman viewed Dante as the medieval heir to Aeschylus. Both writers shared a focus on grand, solitary figures who embody a single, powerful moral state. Dante could describe the most horrific or heavenly scenes with a “dry,” precise economy that Newman associated with the Greek masters. Dante was the “Aristotle of Poetry”, precise and structured, the bridge between Scholastic philosophy and the common heart. In The Idea of a University, we find a formal academic nod to the Italian poet. Even if a writer is not perfectly aligned with Catholic dogma, his genius is a fact of nature. Newman groups Dante with Shakespeare and Homer as the quintessential voices of their respective civilisations. Dante was the supreme poet of the Middle Ages, representing the height of intellectual and ethical culture. He is the example par excellence of how a poet can take abstract theological truths and turn them into something vivid, “real”, imaginative. Dante could make the most complex dogmas feel like lived experiences.
‘The Dream of Gerontius’ (1865) is an answer to Dante’s “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”. While Dante is not mentioned by name within the poem, his influence is palpable. Like The Divine Comedy, the poem follows a soul’s journey after death toward judgement. Dante had succeeded in creating a structured, architectural vision of the afterlife. ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ is similarly structured as a series of distinct phases, following the soul’s transition from the physical world to the metaphysical realm. Gerontius faces the “strange innermost abandonment” of dying. The verse is heavy, anxious, and grounded in physical sensation. Once he is dead, the tone shifts dramatically. The diction becomes light and ethereal as he is accompanied by his Guardian Angel toward the Throne of God. The climactic judgement is a transformative spiritual encounter, a “piercing” moment of love and shame.
Newman used a sophisticated range of meters to reflect the shifting emotional states of the characters, from iambic pentameter to hymnody. Mortality is figured in “shuddering” imagery and the “clinging” of the soul to the body, intercession in the rhythmic prayers of the “assistants” around the deathbed, the sublime in the keen, multi-coloured light of the angelic realm, forgiveness in the metaphor of the “cleansing fire” that heals rather than hurts. The poem is thus a highly original meditation on the last things that every human must face.
Newman’s prose was in his lifetime, and for years after his death, celebrated as some of the finest in the English language. It is intellectually rigorous, emotionally resonant, and stylistically effortless. Whether he was writing about theology, education, or his own life, his writing carries a distinct musicality and psychological depth. Newman loved playing the violin and he saw poetry as a form of music. His style was the “shadow” of his thought. He eschewed the heavy, purple prose common in the Victorian era for a lucidity that feels modern. He chooses words with a surgical accuracy, ensuring that complex philosophical ideas are accessible without being watered down. Even when his sentences are long and grammatically complex, they do not feel muddy.
Newman had a genius for capturing the “hidden life of the mind”. In his Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), he does not simply list facts; he describes the subtle shifts in his own perspective on the events of his life. He writes as if he is in a private conversation with a close friend. This creates a sense of trust because he sounds like a living, breathing person, not a textbook. He excels at describing grey areas of belief and doubt. His prose has a physical cadence to it. He was a master of the Ciceronian period, long, flowing sentences that build up momentum and then resolve in a satisfying snap. He often follows a long, elaborate passage with a short, punchy sentence that drives the point home sharply.
The great author is the one who has something to say and knows how to say it. Newman writes passionately because he feels keenly and conceives vividly. His great contribution to English philosophy was the concept of the Illative Sense, which he describes in An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (1870). He proposes that we reach conclusions not through logic alone, but through a “convergence of probabilities”. The human mind reaches a state of certainty in matters where mathematical or strictly logical proof is inadequate. In simple terms, the Illative Sense is the mind’s ability to read between the lines of various pieces of evidence to arrive at a firm conclusion. The Illative Sense is the faculty that bridges the gap between probability and certainty. We reach certainty through an accumulation of many small probabilities. Individually, these clues might not prove anything, but together, they become undeniable.
The Illative Sense is unique to the individual. It depends on personal experience, character, and mental reach. It often works faster than we can explain. You just know someone is lying, even if you cannot immediately list the seventeen subtle facial cues that led you to that conclusion. It is a sense of judgement, much as a master architect can look at a building and know intuitively whether or not it is structurally sound, without running every calculation first. It is the mind that reasons and that controls its reasonings, not any technical apparatus of words and propositions. It is the Illative Sense that explains religious faith. While we cannot prove God in a laboratory, a person can be rational in his belief because of the converging evidence of history, conscience, and personal experience. It moves us from inference (acknowledging that a conclusion follows from premises) to assent (the total, unconditional “yes” of the mind).
Newman’s prose reflects this principle; he builds his arguments by layering small, persuasive details until the conclusion feels inevitable and whole, as distinct from strictly logical analysis. His voice is urbane and polite even when dismantling his opponent’s argument. He can pivot from dry academic analysis to soaring poetic confidence in a single page, and despite the length of his expository writing there is very little persiflage. Every word serves the architecture of the thought. Newman’s writing is excellent because it respects the reader’s intelligence while appealing to the heart. It is the gold standard for persuasive prose.
All that has been said so far can be summed up by saying Newman was as a thinker and writer of poetic sensibility. His education and temperament attracted him to poetry and poets. The letters he wrote, the sermons he preached, his historical and dogmatic writings, his own poems, the range of his reading, all confirm him as a man for whom the life of the imaginative mind was of priceless importance.
Before moving to sketch his relationship with a range of English poets, those who wrote before him and those of his own time, one novelist needs particular mention.
Newman and Sir Walter Scott together explore the intellectual and emotional roots of the nineteenth century. Newman had a lifelong devotion to Scott’s novels. One a titan of the pulpit and the other a titan of the printing press, they shared a theological chemistry. On his deathbed Newman asked to have Guy Mannering (1815) read to him. To Newman, Scott was a writer of “high moral tone” and “conservative” instinct. As the leader of the Oxford Movement through the 1830s, Newman credited him with preparing the ground for the Catholic Revival in England. Scott is both novelist and precursor to a spiritual awakening. His historical romances broke the ice of the eighteenth century by reviving an interest in the medieval past: his vivid depictions of the Middle Ages moved the public back towarsd a world of ritual, chivalry and tradition. His stories embrace the “unseen world” and the grandeur of history; they matched Newman’s desire to return British religion back to its ancient metaphorical roots. Scott made the “old ways” fashionable again, assisting Newman to explain that truth could be found more richly in antiquity than in modern innovation.
But Newman was not a blind fan. Scott’s works were a shadow of the truth that led to the assent of faith. They lacked the intellectual solidity of dogma. Scott could paint the cathedral that Newman wanted to live inside with a clear explanation as to why the cathedral was there. Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819) needed his Apologia. The quest to romanticise and preserve history as a source of national identity and charm was a step, but only a step, towards the recovery and definition of religious truth and the vital root of spiritual authority. Newman’s Lyra Apostolica (1836), his Lives of the English Saints (1844) and his own novels were needed as complementary texts.
English medieval literature, the poems of Chaucer and the spiritual texts ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ and ‘The Wanderer’ were part of Newman’s poetic furniture. ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ bears striking structural and thematic similarities to the tenth- century Old English poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’. These texts led him naturally to the seventeenth-century English Metaphysicals.
II A Conspectus of Newman’s Poet-Companions from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, arranged by date of birth
Even if there is no documented evidence for it, Newman will certainly have read poets not included in this prospectus. It is inconceivable that he did not read and enjoy Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales or, notwithstanding his outlandish theological opinions, William Blake’s wonderful poems about childhood and the poetic imagination. He would certainly have been drawn to the Welsh metaphysical imagination of Henry Vaughan (1621-1696). And there are no doubt others.
This list consists of the poets about whom Newman wrote in one context or another, engaging with particular points of connection relevant to his own understanding of the world in which he thought, felt and lived.
Newman and John Donne (1572–1631) are the two great converts of English literary history. Both were master stylists who shaped the English language to map the messy, often painful intersections of the intellect and the soul. Both men experienced high-profile, life-altering shifts in their religious identity that defined their careers. Both engaged in a struggle between flesh and spirit.
Donne, born into a recusant Catholic family during a time of Elizabethan and Jacobean persecution, eventually conformed to the new Protestant Church of England, becoming in 1621 Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral. His ‘Holy Sonnets’ reflect the inner violence of this transition, the feeling of being “batter’d” by God. Newman “crossed the Tiber” to become a Roman Catholic in 1845. His Apologia is the spiritual autobiography explaining that move. Newman’s cardinalate motto, Cor ad Cor Loquitur, “Heart Speaks to Heart”, echoes the poetic project of John Donne as poet of the intellectual heart:
Neither man was a soft sentimentalist. They were both fiercely logical, academic, steeped in Patristic study. Yet more than from their logic, their power comes from poetic intimacy. Donne’s poetry treats God as a lover or a conqueror; Newman’s treats God as the “Indwelling Presence.” They both moved away from abstract theology toward a lived, psychological experience of the divine. Donne used conceits, elaborate, unexpected metaphors, such as comparing two lovers to the legs of a compass, to explain spiritual truths. Newman sees the human heart as a place where the world has set up a “usurping” influence.
Only the “Kindly Light”, as he calls it in “The Pillar of the Cloud” (1833), or the “force”,as Donne calls it, can break through the paralysis of the ego. For both men religious conviction is a power that seizes hold of you. In “Holy Sonnet XIV”, Donne presents the moment of spiritual crisis, the scream for help that rises when you realise you are lost:
Strike through my gates, O flame that will not tire,
Not with a gentle tap, but thunder’s blow;
Let splintered walls fall inward, and the fire
Consume the dust where colder embers glow.
Breathe not as breeze, but as the storm that bends
The rooted oak and strips it to the bone;
Break me, unmake me, till the fracture mends
In shapes I could not fashion on my own.
For I am held in fetters of my will,
A traitor to the truth I claim to keep;
Woo me with lightning, fierce and burning still,
Till in your grasp my restless heart can sleep.
Take siege of me, and in that conquest prove
The chains of wrath are loosed by violent love.
Newman presents the aftermath of the crisis he experienced in a Mediterranean storm as the calm realisation that God’s “power hath blessed” him:
Lead, kindly Light, amid the encircling gloom,
Lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home,
Lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see
The distant scene, one step enough for me.
I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou
Shouldst lead me on:
I loved to choose and see my path, but now
Lead thou me on!
I loved the garish days, and, spite of fears,
Pride ruled my will: remember not past years.
So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still
Will lead me on;
O’er moor and fen, o’er crag and torrent, till
The night is gone;
And with the morn those angel faces smile
Which I have loved long since, and lost awhile.
It is the power of poetic insight, or imagination, that apprehends and responds to truth’s seizing.
George Herbert (1593-1633) was a model for the Anglican via media that the Anglican Newman espoused in his Tract 90 of 1841. They shared an ability to turn intense spiritual struggle into high art. Herbert the Caroline Divine, the country parson, is the “poet of the soul” par excellence. He walked away from a glittering career at court to become a humble priest in a Wiltshire village. Like Donne he employed conceits, but his work was quieter. He used “pattern” or “concrete” poems in which the shape of the poem’s form on the page embodied its subject matter. “Easter Wings” is the most famous.
Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.
His work focuses on the zigzag of the spiritual life, the constant back-and-forth between feeling God’s love and feeling utterly unworthy of it.
Newman sensed in Herbert’s poems a signpost back to pre-Reformation roots. His spirituality was a movement of the whole person, imagination, conscience, and intellect combined. There is a specific “Englishness” in the devotion of both men. They valued liturgy. They saw beauty, music, and ritual as essential to reaching a God that logic alone could not find. They emphasised intellectual honesty: Neither was content with easy answers, both documented their interior combat with gruelling honesty. Herbert’s lines in “The Church-Porch” anticipate Newman:
A verse may find him who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.
Herbert the Metaphysical poet who uses poetic structure to capture the divine, meets Newman the Victorian stylist who uses his autobiography to understand himself.
In his collection ‘The Temple’, Herbert treats the book of poems as a physical building. Each poem represents a part of the church (“The Altar,” “The Church-floor,” “The Windows”). His metaphors are intellectual and homely” He compares God’s grace to a pulley or a bottle. These physical places and objects accord with Newman’s grammar of assent: when you see a truth vividly it changes your life. The metaphor of light and glass conveys how God’s truth filters through human imperfection.
Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
This glorious and transcendent place,
To be a window, through thy grace.
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
More reverend grows, and more doth win;
Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one
When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
And in the ear, not conscience, ring.
No two poets could be more different than George Herbert and John Milton (1608-1674). Newman’s relationship with Milton’s poetry was a complex mix of literary admiration and theological hostility. While he recognised Milton as a master of the English language, he recoiled from his religious and political views. Milton was an essential part of the English literary canon. In his lectures on The Idea of a University, Newman acknowledged that the development of English literature could not be properly understood without attending to Milton. Milton was “gifted with incomparable gifts” and possessed a “proud and rebellious” genius. His style, his “stateliness” and “sublimity”, was a benchmark for the heights the English language could reach. ‘The Dream of Gerontius’, defers to Miltonic structures and themes, and in aspects of his depiction of the afterlife and the celestial hierarchy.
In his essay “Poetry with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics” Newman comments in relation to Paradise Lost on the moral character and “sublimity” of the poet himself that leaks into the verse. The spirit that pervades the epic is a religious devotion. Dramatic feeling overwhelms even technical skill. Captivated by Milton’s characterisation of Satan, he saw it as a masterpiece of intellectual energy and “shattered majesty”. Milton’s ability to sustain a single “musical thought” over twenty or thirty lines was the highest achievement of the English ear. The opening lines of Paradise Lost are a sublime manifestation of this.
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal taste
Brought Death into the World, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav’nly Muse:
But Newman abhorred Milton’s radical Protestant sectarianism. He was a “proud and rebellious creature of God,” vehemently anti-Catholic and a justifier of the execution of King Charles I. A Victorian Catholic must inevitably feel a natural repugnance for Milton’s ideology. He was a “national and historical fact” who, even if his theology was repugnant, could not be denied a supreme literary place in the “organic whole” of English culture, a powerful force that helped shape the language Newman used to defend the Catholic faith.
Newman’s admiration for William Shakespeare provides a contrast to his attitude to Milton. While Milton represented a theological adversary, Shakespeare was a source of comfort and philosophical alignment. Shakespeare’s worldview was to Newman fundamentally Catholic. He admired Shakespeare for his “knowledge of the human heart”, a poet who accepted the world as it was, fallen, messy, complex, not one who tried to rebuild it according to a personal ideology, as Milton did. In his literary essays, Newman suggested that the “moral breath” of Shakespeare’s plays was consistent with Catholic ethics, particularly regarding justice, mercy, and the reality of the supernatural. Milton was a genius, but his spirit was dangerous to true faith.
In the poems of Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) we find a connection that is more about a shared intellectual theology of the imagination than direct personal influence. They belong together in literary studies because of their navigation of the tension between intellectual wit and spiritual devotion. Newman’s poetry shares Marvell’s economy of expression, a preference for intellectual density rather than pretty melody. Marvell employed observation of nature to point toward a higher spiritual reality. Newman, similarly, viewed the physical world as a “screen” or a “shadow” of the invisible world that amounted to a sacramental system. Both men were formidable controversialists who used wit as a weapon, Marvell in his sharp political and religious satires, employing irony to expose the absurdities of his opponents. Newman’s Apologia employs a similarly rhetorical, sophisticated, psychologically acute style to dismantle the attacks of his critics.
Poetic dialogue between Marvell and Newman becomes a study in how wit serves truth. Newman’s poetry collected in Verses on Various Occasions (1868) employs the metaphysical style Marvell perfected. Both poets use logic to navigate intense emotional or spiritual crises. In “The Garden” Marvell celebrates a retreat from the “busy companies of men” into a “green thought in a green shade”. Nature can “annihilate” the physical world into a spiritual or intellectual state. The garden becomes an Edenic mind-space.
Meanwhile the mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness;
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find,
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
Newman in “The Sign of the Cross”, views the world as a screen of the invisible. Like Marvell’s in his garden, his “solitude” is not mere loneliness; it is a deliberate withdrawal to find a higher reality.
Whenever across this sinful flesh of mine
I draw the Holy Sign,
All good thoughts stir within me, and renew
Their slumbering strength divine;
Till there springs up a courage high and true
To suffer and to do.
And who shall say, but hateful spirits around,
For their brief hour unbound,
Shudder to see, and wail their overthrow?
While on far heathen ground
Some lonely Saint hails the fresh odour, though
Its source he cannot know.
These poets are haunted by the brevity of life and the weight of eternity. T S Eliot revived Marvell’s reputation by praising his “unity of sensibility”, the ability to feel a thought as intensely as the odour of a rose. In his Verses on Various Occasions Newman claims that same metaphysical unity. His poems are not mere feelings; they are ordered emotional arguments. In “The Pillar of the Cloud” he does not merely ask for God’s help; in seeking it he analyses the psychology of pride that “loved to choose and see my path” and the necessary surrender of the will that will move to faithful assent.
“The Garden” presents nature as a spiritual mirror. Newman’s “The Elements” takes a further imaginative step to apprehend nature as a manifestation of angels. The shadow of the seventeenth century hangs over him. We see him trying to solve the spiritual problems that Marvell’s generation first raised:
MAN is permitted much
To scan and learn
In Nature’s frame;
Till he well-nigh can tame
Brute mischiefs, and can touch
Invisible things, and turn
All warring ills to purposes of good.
Thus, as a god below,
He can control,
And harmonize, what seems amiss to flow
As sever’d from the whole
And dimly understood.
Newman could not have known the works of Thomas Traherne (1636-1674) because they were not discovered and identified until 1896, six years after his death. Yet there are striking thematic parallels between the two poets, particularly regarding the innocence of childhood. Newman wrote about his own childhood spiritual experiences in the Apologia, describing a sense of the “unreality” of material things and a solitary communion with God.
I used to wish the Arabian Tales were true: my imagination ran on unknown influences, on magical powers, and spells. I thought life might be a dream, or I an Angel, and all this world a deception, my fellow-angels by a playful device concealing themselves from me and deceiving me with the semblance of a material world.
He goes on to explain that this was not just a childhood whim, but a deep-seated feeling of “the isolation of many individuals” and a sense of:
…resting in the thought of two and two only absolute and luminously self-evident beings, myself and my Creator.
This recalls Traherne’s Centuries of Meditations (1670), where he describes the world appearing to his infant eyes as a place of “orient and immortal wheat”. Traherne recounts the “pure and virgin apprehensions” of his infancy, a world seen through the eyes of a child who does not yet understand boundaries, death, or “the dirty devices of this world.”
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy…
Or in his poem “Wonder”:
How like an angel came I down!
How bright are all things here!
When first among his works I did appear
O how their glory me did crown!
The world resembled his eternity,
In which my soul did walk;
And ev’ry thing that I did see
Did with me talk.
Newman and Traherne represent two distinct yet resonant peaks of English spiritual literature. Both were shaped by an emphasis on the theme of the beauty of holiness. Traherne’s mysticism provided a spiritual foundation for the kind of sacramental view of the world that Newman would later champion in Oxford. They are linked by their focus on the inner life, the illumination of the soul, and a shared apprehension that childhood contains a unique, divine clarity.
Traherne the metaphysical poet was a priest who sought “felicity”, a state of intense spiritual joy and wonder. Children are born with a “pure and virgin apprehension” of the world, seeing the earth as a paradise before being corrupted by social conventions. He saw the human mind as “spherical” and boundless, capable of containing the entire universe and reflecting the glory of God. Newman’s focus was more intellectual and developmental, but no less mystical. We come to believe things through a holistic, personal grasp of the truth, knowing that “to live is to change, and to be perfect is to have changed often”, as Newman put it in An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845). Religious understanding is a journey of the soul that unfolds over time.
Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) wrote in a baroque style that was less attractive to Newman than that of other metaphysical poets, but they are nevertheless spiritual cousins. Both men suffered socially and professionally for their shift to Catholicism. Crashaw, disowned by his family on account of his conversion, died in exile in Italy; Newman was for decades in a kind of domestic exile, viewed with deep suspicion by his old and new friends. Both brought a distinct and intense aesthetic to their faith.
Crashaw is the “wild child” of the metaphysical poets. While peers like John Donne were intellectual and “knotty”, Crashaw was visceral, sensory, and ecstatic. His poetry is defined by the Baroque of melting gold, bleeding hearts, and weeping eyes. He focused on the physical sensations of divine love. In his poems about the mystic Saint Teresa of Avila, he blurs the line between physical passion and spiritual rapture. In “The Flaming Heart” (1648) he meditates on a painting of the saint being pierced by a seraph’s golden arrow, an ecstasy that is both a physical wound and a spiritual union.
O heart, the equal poise of love’s both parts,
Big alike with wounds and darts,
Live in these conquering leaves; live all the same,
And walk through all tongues one triumphant flame;
Live here, great heart, and love and die and kill,
And bleed and wound, and yield and conquer still.
Let this immortal life, where’er it comes,
Walk in a crowd of loves and martyrdoms;
Let mystic deaths wait on ’t, and wise souls be
The love-slain witnesses of this life of thee.
O sweet incendiary! show here thy art,
Upon this carcass of a hard cold heart,
Let all thy scatter’d shafts of light, that play
Among the leaves of thy large books of day,
Combin’d against this breast, at once break in
And take away from me my self and sin;
This gracious robbery shall thy bounty be,
And my best fortunes such fair spoils of me.
O thou undaunted daughter of desires!
By all thy dow’r of lights and fires,
By all the eagle in thee, all the dove,
By all thy lives and deaths of love,
By thy large draughts of intellectual day,
And by thy thirsts of love more large than they,
By all thy brim-fill’d bowls of fierce desire,
By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire,
By the full kingdom of that final kiss
That seiz’d thy parting soul and seal’d thee his,
By all the heav’ns thou hast in him,
Fair sister of the seraphim!
By all of him we have in thee,
Leave nothing of my self in me:
Let me so read thy life that I
Unto all life of mine may die.
If Crashaw is the heart on fire, Newman is the mind seeking light. They share a common thread: the importance of the affections. When Newman became a Catholic, he joined the Oratory of St. Philip Neri, the Counter-Reformation saint of the era that produced Crashaw’s style of piety. Beauty is a path to God. For neither could religion grow in cold logic. For Crashaw, it was through the sweetness of the senses, for Newman, it was the interior knowing of truth through the whole person, senses, mind, body, spirit. Different as their poetic voices were, Newman’s motto heart speaks to heart captures the spirit of Crashaw’s seeking a direct, emotional collision with the divine.
Newman wrote “The Pillar of the Cloud” while he was lost at sea, both physically in the Mediterranean and spiritually in his faith. The “light” he sees is not the blinding flash of a Crashaw, but a small lantern that illuminates just enough of the path to keep him moving. He seeks not a sensory explosion, only for guidance. Crashaw’s light is the opposite. In his poem dedicated to Saint Teresa, he wants not a “step”, he wants to be consumed.
Thou shalt look round about and see
Thousands of crown’d souls throng to be
Themselves thy crown; sons of thy vows,
The virgin-births with which thy sovereign spouse
Made fruitful thy fair soul, go now
And with them all about thee, bow
To him. “Put on,” he’ll say, “put on,
My rosy love, that thy rich zone
Sparkling with the sacred flames
Of thousand souls whose happy names
Heav’n keeps upon thy score. Thy bright
Life brought them first to kiss the light
That kindled them to stars.” And so
Thou with the Lamb, thy Lord, shalt go,
And wheresoe’er he sets his white
Steps, walk with him those ways of light
Which who in death would live to see
Must learn in life to die like thee.
In Crashaw’s world, the light is a fire that melts the soul, baroque in the truest sense, dramatic, high-contrast, emotionally overwhelming. Yet Newman, reserved Victorian that he was, was moved by the same Catholic mystics Crashaw loved.
The difference between them is one of temperament and period. Newman’s is the modern search for truth amidst a climate of increasing religious doubt, the “kindly light” in the dark. Crashaw seeks immersion in the “flaming heart” of the divine presence. For both Cor ad Cor Loquitur catches it: the core of religious experience is not a book or a law, but an intimate, pulsating connection between two persons.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744), the eighteenth-century master of the biting heroic couplet, the Enlightenment wit, is linked to Newman by his mastery of the English language, his Catholic faith, and his role as cultural critic. Pope was the definitive voice of the Augustan Age, unable because of anti-Catholic penal laws to attend university or hold public office. His pen was his weapon, precision, correct, sharpened to navigate a society that marginalized him.
Newman admired the clarity and economy of Augustan poets. Pope lived in a society where being a Catholic meant being largely ostracised. Newman lived through the Catholic Emancipation of 1829 and the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in 1850. He essentially became the public intellectual voice that Pope’s era would not allow a Catholic to be.
Alexander Pope provided the architectural skeleton of modern English; Newman put the flesh and spirit on it for the Victorian age. Both were concerned with how the human mind learns and interacts with the world. For both, reason was a gift, but one that was easily abused by pride. In ‘An Essay on Man’, Pope argues that humans occupy a middle ground between “gods” and “beasts.” He warns against “presuming to scan” God. Our reason is meant to understand our place in the natural order, not to master the universe. Newman took this further in A Grammar of Assent.
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is man.
Plac’d on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a god, or beast;
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such,
Whether he thinks too little, or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confus’d;
Still by himself abus’d, or disabus’d;
Created half to rise, and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl’d:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!
Pope’s view on education was largely defensive. He lived in the Age of Dulness, and in his epic satire The Dunciad, he mocked the pedantry of his time. To Pope, education should be classical, grounded in the correct ancients, Homer, Horace, Virgil. It should refine taste and prevent the chaos of bad writing and bad thinking. Newman had no quarrel with that. His defence of liberal education in The Idea of a University proposes that a university exists to train the intellect and to create a “philosophical habit of mind” that embraces all branches of learning. Like Pope, he wanted to produce a refined individual, and like Pope, Newman warned that “knowledge is one thing, virtue is another.” The status of Catholics in England had changed. Pope had to be a satirist. Newman could be the liberated voice of intelligent Catholicism. Newman articulates the development of the English Catholic identity that Pope had to keep hidden behind satire and the gardens at Twickenham.
Newman called William Cowper (1731-1800) the “Protestant poet” of introspection and the ability to articulate spiritual struggles. Cowper’s hymns accompanied Newman’s Evangelical upbringing through his formative years at school. The melancholy “interiority” of Cowper’s The Task (1785) and his shorter poems left a lasting impression on Newman’s own prose style. In The Idea of a University Newman cites Cowper to illustrate the nature of English literature and the role of the “national poet”, recognising him as a writer whose work was embedded in the English religious and moral consciousness. In Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851) Newman invokes Cowper while discussing the Protestant imagination and the literary landscape of England. He knowledges Cowper’s influence on the character of the English mind, even as Newman himself moved towards Catholicism. In “Poetry with reference to Aristotle’s Poetics”, he quotes Cowper’s poetry to emphasize points about nature, solitude, and the interior religious life.
Cowper was prodigious in writing hymns, many of which remain in the repertoire. The most famous accords with Newman’s direct and personal theology.
God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea
And rides upon the storm.
Deep in unfathomable mines
Of never failing skill
He treasures up His bright designs
And works His sov’reign will.
Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take;
The clouds ye so much dread
Are big with mercy and shall break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
His purposes will ripen fast,
Unfolding every hour;
The bud may have a bitter taste,
But sweet will be the flow’r.
Blind unbelief is sure to err
And scan His work in vain;
God is His own interpreter,
And He will make it plain.
No dissent from Newman there.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850), shared an intellectual and spiritual temper that came to define the Victorian era. Like Newman, he reacted against the clinical rationalism of the Enlightenment. They found human truth not in logic or mathematics, but in the imagination and the heart. Wordsworth saw the natural world as a “venerable” presence that could spark a sense of the divine. Newman saw the “still small voice” within the human soul as the primary evidence for God’s existence.
Wordsworth was a huge influence on the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who saw his poetry as a pre-theological preparation for their mission. Poems like “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” hinted at the sacramental quality of the world, the idea that physical things, trees, rivers, light, point to a deeper spiritual reality. Wordworth’s autobiographical epic, The Prelude (1805), subtitled “The Growth of the Poet’s Mind”, anticipated Newman’s Apologia, a similar mapping of a mind on its journey into assent. These are explorations of human psychology.
In other ways they diverged. The Romantic Movement could assist theology only so far. While they respected each other, there was a fundamental difference in their destinations. Wordsworth was brilliant, but nature alone could not provide the authority necessary for salvation. Gradually Newman saw his poems as offering a sort of religious philosophy, but not a religion.
Newman’s critique of Wordsworth is another case (as in the case of Milton) of admiring the genius but fearing the theology, or a pseudo-theology. He viewed Wordsworth as a vital remedy for the dry materialism of the age, but as he moved closer to Rome, his assessment became more critical. Wordsworth’s “religion of nature” drifted too close to pantheism, the idea that God and nature are the same thing. While nature can hint at a Creator, it cannot reveal a personal God.
In the “Immortality Ode”, childhood is seen as a state of divine purity “trailing clouds of glory.”
Now, while the birds thus sing a joyous song,
And while the young lambs bound
As to the tabor’s sound,
To me alone there came a thought of grief:
A timely utterance gave that thought relief,
And I again am strong:
The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep;
No more shall grief of mine the season wrong;
I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng,
The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep,
And all the earth is gay;
Land and sea
Give themselves up to jollity,
And with the heart of May
Doth every Beast keep holiday;—
Thou Child of Joy,
Shout round me, let me hear thy shouts, thou happy Shepherd-boy.
Newman loved this poem. He saw it as the closest a “natural” poet could get to Catholic truth. As we have seen, in his Apologia, he describes his childhood feeling that the world was “not real,” and that he was a solitary soul in communication with his Creator. He concurred with Wordsworth that children have a “spiritual instinct” that adults lose.
Newman’s was a fight against liberalism in religion, defined as the belief that one religion is as good as another because it is all based on personal feeling. Wordsworth’s view of the human condition was too optimistic. By focusing on the natural goodness of the soul, he ignored the moral wreckage that required divine intervention and systemic penance. There was no dogma, and in particular no doctrine of original sin. Looking at a sunset will not save a soul; only Grace can. There was Wordsworth’s flaw. His spirituality was subjective; it relied solely on the individual’s feeling or imagination to find truth. For Newman that truth, to be Truth, must be objective and dogmatic: the heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, but once the heart is reached, it must submit to guiding authority, not merely wander through a forest.
Wordsworth’s and Newman’s worldviews collide spectacularly in “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”.
These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man’s eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man’s life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy
We see into the life of things.
To Wordsworth this poem was a secular confession. To Newman, it was a beautiful but misleading example of a philosophical religion.
The most famous passage in “Tintern Abbey” describes a “sense sublime” and a “motion and a spirit” that rolls through all things. Wordsworth’s “Sublime” identifies a divine force in the “light of setting suns” and the “mind of man.” It is an internal, felt experience. For Newman this was actually a form of idolatry of the self. By finding “God” in the woods and the hills, Wordsworth is actually worshipping his own elevated feelings. He credits his memories of the Wye River with his moral health, calling them “sensations sweet” that lead to “acts of kindness and of love.” Nature is the “nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart”. It is a self-sufficient moral system. But for Newman a beautiful view cannot change a human heart or forgive a sin. Wordsworth confuses aesthetics with ethics.
The setting of the poem, the ruins of a Catholic monastery, is ironic when read through Newman’s eyes. To Wordsworth the ruins are a charming part of the scenery. They are picturesque and venerable, but their original religious purpose (prayer, the mass, the monks) is irrelevant to his experience. Newman sees the ruins of Tintern as a tragedy, a sign of England’s lost spiritual heritage. To him, the real power of Tintern is not the trees that surround it, but the altar that in centuries past stood inside it.
In The Idea of a University Newman insisted that a university must teach literature because it is the record of the human heart. He would not ban Wordsworth but include him as an example of national talent. An educated person has a mind that is broad, reasoned, and refined. There must be space for Wordsworth’s focus on deep reflection and philosophic calm. It aligns with the goal of creating a disciplined intellect.
But there Newman draws a hard line. Knowledge is not virtue. You can read all the Wordsworth you like and become a refined, sensitive person, but that does not make you a holy person or even a Christian. A purely literary education creates a civilised person, a gentleman even, but one who has replaced conscience with taste. A fully mature person must resist the tendency to swap the harsh realities of the Cross for the pleasant feelings of a sunset. Wordsworth’s is a civilised religion that lacks the teeth of true moral accountability. Ultimately, Newman treated Wordsworth as a tutor who takes a student to the door of the temple but does not go inside. He credited the Poet Laureate with opening the hearts of Englishmen again to a pseudo-sacramental principle, that invisible intimations are communicated through visible signs, but without any apparatus to explain it. Thus, Newman’s central thesis in The Idea of a University is that a university must have a Faculty of Theology to act as a ballast for the Arts and Sciences. Without theology, literature and science will try to explain the whole world on their own terms, leading to a distorted view of reality. With theology, poetry is put in its rightful place as a beautiful ancillary to the truth, rather than Truth itself. The poet of the “Immortality Ode” was a high priest of natural religion. Wordsworth provides the longing for immortality, but only theology provides the means to reach it. Wordsworth gives the intimations. Newman wants to provide the grammar of assent.
The Romantic Movement was a cultural thawing out. For the younger Romantics, Keats and Shelley, Newman had less regard, too focused, he thought, on sense and luxury of feeling. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), on the other hand, made a distinguished contribution to religious thought as the intellectual pioneer of English romanticism. Newman credited Coleridge with “installing a higher philosophy” into the English mind. He was the man who broke the spell of an empiricism that believed that only what we see and touch is real. His greatest works, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Christabel”, delve into the eerie subconscious realms of the human mind, requiring the “willing suspension of disbelief” to explore moral and existential depths.
In “Frost at Midnight”, Coleridge pioneers an intimate, discursive poetic style that blends nature with extended philosophical inquiry. His focus on Reason as distinct from Understanding assisted Newman to present a coherent case that faith was a legitimate form of knowledge.
The Frost performs its secret ministry,
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry
Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which fluttered on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, every where
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And makes a toy of Thought.
The heart is commonly reached, not through reason, but through a “sole unquiet thing” identified by imagination that is the mind’s power of insight. With Coleridge, Newman knew you had to make people feel the beauty of theology before they could accept its rules. While Coleridge helped create the modern concept of the “poetic genius” who communes with the mysteries of the universe, Newman saw poetry as a tool for asceticism, a way to refine the heart and mind towards faith. Coleridge’s poetry can feel like a wild, misty moor, when Newman’s feels like the quiet, filtered light of a cathedral. The one seeks to discover mystery through the senses; the other seeks to submit to mystery as a pathway to faith.
In Robert Southey (1774-1843) Newman found a soul friend. He held Southey’s work in particularly high regard as a vital moral and philosophical precursor to his religious development. He was a devoted reader of Southey from a young age. He described Southey’s epic poem, Thalaba the Destroyer, as the most “morally sublime” of all English poems.
Southey’s poems were not mere stories; they were explorations of duty, providence, and the battle between good and evil. With Wordsworth and Coleridge, Southey had prepared the English mind for religious feelings by moving literature away from dry narrative towards something more imaginative and spiritual. Southey’s tales of Madoc and Roderick, last of the Goths, focus on foundational myths and themes of religious struggle.
Newman was captivated by Thalaba the Destroyer. The poem’s rhythm and its relentless focus on a lonely soul battling overwhelming darkness spoke to him.
Unlike the structured rhyming couplets of Augustan verse, the verse of Thalaba is irregular and unrhymed. Newman found this freedom of style, and the story of a young man chosen by providence to destroy a cavern of evil sorcerers, deeply appealing. He pointed to the ending of the poem as a pinnacle of moral beauty. In the final Book XII, Thalaba finds the cave of the magicians but realizes that to destroy them he must sacrifice his own life. The following lines capture the moment Thalaba accepts his fate, guided by the spirit of his departed wife, Oneiza:
Prophet of God, my trust is in thy word!
Thy will be done!
The Lamp of Souls burnt on, and Thalaba
Looked at it with a steady eye of faith,
The self-devoted Youth
Held out his hand, and as he touched the Flame,
His mortal part was changed.
Newman focused on its moral compass. Thalaba wins not through cleverness; he wins through obedience on a journey from gloom to light. The invisible world is more real than the visible one. Thalaba’s death is not a tragedy but an elevation to a higher reality.
John Henry Newman and John Keble (1792-1866) were the titans of the Oxford effort to return the Church of England to its catholic and apostolic roots. Their poetry was the emotional engine of their movement, offering verse to make complex spiritual concepts feel intimate and lived. If Newman was the movement’s intellectual fire, Keble was its heartbeat. The Christian Year (1827), was probably the most popular book of poetry of the nineteenth century, outselling even Tennyson and Wordsworth.
Keble exhibited a poetic reserve that deep religious truths should not be shouted but whispered through nature and liturgy. He was the poet of the everyday. His style is gentle, meditative, and tied to the seasons of the Church. The natural world is a sacramental system, a “book” where every leaf and sky-glance points toward the Creator. Newman’s poetry is sharper, more psychological, and somewhat darker than Keble’s. While Keble sought peace in the landscape, Newman sought the “kindly light” amidst the gloom of personal and intellectual conversion. As can be seen in Lyra Apostolica (1843), a collaborative collection of poems, Newman’s verse is more dramatic and argumentative. It reflects his internal wrestling, first as a leader of a religious revival and later as a Catholic convert. In an era of rising industrialism and religious doubt, Keble and Newman offered poetry to re-enchant the world. They did not want people merely to believe; they wanted them to feel the workings of God through the rhythm of their Christian lives.
Newman and Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) were the intellectual pillars of the Victorian era. They shared a concern for the spiritual desert created by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of scientific empiricism. They were two doctors diagnosing the same illness, a loss of meaning, but prescribing very different cures, the one Dogma, the other Culture. Arnold thought religion could no longer hold the line against Victorian social anarchy. In Culture and Anarchy (1869) he divided British society into three rather unflattering groups:
Barbarians: The aristocracy, stagnant and polite
Philistines: The middle class, obsessed with money and machinery
Populace: The working class, raw and unguided.
His solution was the pursuit of Culture. By studying the classics and maintaining “disinterestedness”, or objectivity, society could find a secular substitute for the moral guidance once provided by religious faith.
Like Newman, Arnold felt the “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar” of faith that he described in his poem “Dover Beach” (1867).
The sea is calm tonight.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.
Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.
The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Arnold had attended some of Newman’s sermons at Oxford in the 1830s and was deeply moved by Newman’s style and personality. They feared that without a grounding force, society would dissolve into rampant materialism and egoism. Newman looked backward and upward toward a divine institution; Arnold looked across history toward human excellence. A human being is more than a cog in an industrial machine. The ability to appreciate art, poetry, and elegance of thought was a touchstone for both men. So too was the nurturing of intelligence that saw things as they really are, without being blinded by political or religious prejudice. A person of culture was not a mere bookworm. Instead, said Arnold, a person of culture should use sweetness and light to make “reason and the will of God prevail.” By “will of God,” Arnold did not necessarily mean a deity, but rather the highest moral potential of humanity.
While Arnold looked to Culture as a substitute for religion, Newman saw a liberal education as the proper handmaid to religion. The mind is a spiritual instrument that needs to be polished. For Arnold education was there to make us better citizens and more human. For Newman education was there to train the intellect to seek divine truth. For Arnold, teaching authority lay in the ideas of the best poets and critics, the best that has been thought and said. For Newman, teaching authority lay with the successors to the apostles and objective theology. Arnold sought a bulwark against social anarchy. Newman sought perfection of mind and heart towards holiness. Arnold’s favourite word was disinterestedness, by which we look at life without a personal stake or agenda. Newman believed that true knowledge ultimately requires a commitment, an act of faith.
When it comes to the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-1882), he too was preoccupied with the cultural anxieties confronted by Arnold. Tennyson was the quintessential poetic voice of the age: Newman was the spiritual firebrand of Catholic faith.
The bridge between them was Arthur Henry Hallam, Tennyson’s closest friend whose early death inspired ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’ (1850). Before his death, Hallam had been a member of the Cambridge Apostles, a group engaged with the theological shifts coming out of Oxford in the 1830s. Tennyson and Newman shared many mutual acquaintances in the high-stakes world of Victorian academe. Both men were in search for “the gleam” in a darkening world. “The Gleam” appears in Tennyson’s collection ‘Merlin and the Gleam’, which reflects on themes of poetry and the pursuit of knowledge. Tennyson’s gleam is a faint but persistent inner light that outweighs the dark discoveries of Victorian geology and biology, in both of which he was intensely interested. ‘In Memoriam’ grapples with the problem of “nature, red in tooth and claw”, in which Tennyson struggled to reconcile evolutionary science with traditional faith. Newman, sought a concrete historical authority to quench Tennyson’s “honest doubt”.
Newman admired Tennyson’s verse immensely, finding in it a secular echo of his own spiritual journey. He thought Tennyson’s work was a sort of theology in itself. Their work shares striking thematic common ground. “Crossing the Bar” develops the metaphor of a sandbar at the mouth of a river to figure the transition from life to death:
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,
But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.
Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;
For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.
Stranded in a turbulent Mediterranean Sea, Newman’s metaphor for divine guidance is “kindly light”. Mental and spiritual anguish is common to both poets.
In 1833, the year that brought Newman’s Oxford profile to national fame, Tennyson wrote a poem called “The Two Voices”. It depicts an internal debate between a voice of despair and a voice of hope. It recalls Newman’s own internal struggle before his conversion It begins
A still small voice spake unto me,
‘Thou art so full of misery,
Were it not better not to be?’
Then to the still small voice I said;
‘Let me not cast in endless shade
What is so wonderfully made.’
To which the voice did urge reply;
‘To-day I saw the dragon-fly
Come from the wells where he did lie.
In 1877, Tennyson and Newman met in the deanery at Westminster Abbey where their mutual friend Arthur Stanley was Dean. The meeting was cordial. Despite their theological differences, they found common ground in their mutual dislike of the growing tide of materialism and atheism. Tennyson is said to have been deeply impressed by Newman’s “saintly” presence, while Newman appreciated Tennyson’s role as a moral compass for the British Empire. The poet found God in the mystery of human affairs. The priest found God in the dogmatic traditions of the ancient Church.
Tennyson once said of Newman’s conversion to Catholicism that he would be afraid that if he went to a church like that he would lose his mind. Yet he kept Newman’s books on his shelves. They were two men standing on the same shore, looking at the same stormy sea, They shared a blend of melancholy and resolution. Tennyson ends ‘In Memoriam’ by looking forward to a “higher race” and a God who lives “behind the veil.” Newman, on his deathbed, chose as the epitaph for his grave the words Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem (“out of shadows and phantasms into the truth”). Both poet and priest saw the physical world as a mere curtain or a “shadow” of a substantial spiritual reality. Tennyson stayed in the “twilight” of that shadow, while on his conversion Newman felt he had finally stepped into the sunlight.
Frederick Faber (1814-1863) knew Newman’s Oxford, but their poetic voices reflect two very different aspects of nineteenth-century Catholicism. Their differing approaches were shaped by their personalities. Newman, the restrained intellectual, writes with a chastened style. Faber, the enthusiastic mystic, was unabashedly emotional. He infused hymnody with the sweetness and fervour he saw in Italian devotion. His poetry is lush, accessible, and designed to stir the heart immediately. “Faith of Our Fathers” and “There’s a Wideness in God’s Mercy,” are designed for the fervent congregation; melodic, repetitive in a comforting way, they focus on the overwhelming love of God. Faber was the great populariser of a triumphant Church. He took the high-minded theology of the Oxford Movement and translated it into a language of “holy fire” that the average person in the pew could sing and feel. Newman’s hymnody asks you to think and endure; Faber’s asks you to thrill and adore. It has a robustness that continues to appeal to the modern world.
There’s a wideness in God’s mercy
like the wideness of the sea;
there’s a kindness in His justice
which is more than liberty.
There is welcome for the sinner,
and more graces for the good;
there is mercy with the Saviuor;
there is healing in His blood.
For the love of God is broader
than the measure of our mind;
and the heart of the Eternal
is most wonderfully kind.
If our love were but more simple,
we would take Him at His word,
and our lives would be illumined
by the presence of our Lord.
Faber was thirteen years younger than Newman. The age gap is significant because Faber represents a younger, more impatient generation of the Oxford enthusiasm. While Newman took years of agonising study to convert to Catholicism, Faber followed him just a few weeks later, diving into his new faith with a youthful, continental intensity that Newman found somewhat overwhelming. They did not see eye to eye. Newman founded the Birmingham Oratory, Faber the London Oratory. They inhabited different houses.
Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) was deeply influenced by the Oxford Movement. Her physical world too was a “veil” for a deeper, spiritual reality. Newman’s Tracts for the Times provided the intellectual and theological framework that Rossetti followed throughout her life.
Rossetti effectively took Newman’s dense, academic tracts and turned them into feeling. She evidences his influence in her adherence to the Doctrine of Reserve by which religious truths are revealed gradually and through symbolic recognition. The forbidden fruit in “Goblin Market” hides and reveals moral lessons. “Goblin Market” (1862) is a narrative poem that tells the story of sisters Laura and Lizzie, who are tempted to sin with fruit proffered by goblin merchants.
“A Better Resurrection.” captures the reserve and sacramental theology that Newman championed. In this poem, Rossetti uses the image of a broken cup, cast into a fire to be remodelled as a metaphor for the soul’s need for divine intervention. In the first stanza, she looks at nature and sees only coldness:
My life is like a faded leaf
My harvest dwindled to a husk.
Without God, the material world is empty and “dead.” She looks through the “veil” but finds it opaque until she turns toward a spiritual mode of perception. She calls not for help but follows a diction of controlled liturgical language. Each stanza ends with a repetitive prayer, “O Jesus, quicken me.” Ritual offers a passage that raw spontaneous emotion cannot. In the final stanza she compares her life to a broken bowl:
I lift mine eyes, but help is none;
O look upon me, from Thy holy hill:
My life is like a broken bowl,
A broken bowl that cannot hold one drop of water
Cast in the fire the perished thing;
Melt and remould it, till it be
A royal cup for Him, my King.
The metaphor of becoming a “royal cup” or chalice suggests that the individual soul must be “melted and remoulded” through suffering and grace to become a vessel for the divine.
Rossetti wrote a sonnet titled “Cardinal Newman,” published after his death in 1890. In it she celebrates him as a “kindly light” and a “strong tower.”
O weary Champion of the Cross, lie still:
Sleep thou at length the all-embracing sleep:
Whose vigil thou hast kept, and shalt not keep,
Whose long day’s journey thou hast had thy will.
Thy hand is on the goal, keep holy thrill
In undecaying heart: and gently steep
Thy thoughts in balm of rest, while others weep
For thee, a soul outsoared this world of ill.
Content thee with thy rest, O soul most pure:
Thy task is done; thy warfare is at peace:
In that deep silence where all noises cease,
Where only love and light and life endure,
And where the quietness is ever sure,
Wait till the morning when thy joys increase.
Newman’s relationship with Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) was unique. As an Oxford undergraduate Hopkins became disillusioned with the Church of England. He sought out Newman, who had made the same journey twenty-one years earlier. Newman was the intellectual titan who cleared the path, Hopkins was the sensitive budding poet who followed it into uncharted territory. Hopkins’ conversion to the Catholic faith is the primary bond between them.
Oxford was also their bond. In 1879 Hopkins wrote a poem titled “Duns Scotus’s Oxford.” In it he links the medieval philosopher directly to the city he and Newman loved.
Towery city and branchy between towers;
Cuckoo-echoing, bell-swarmèd, lark charmèd, rook racked, river-rounded;
The dapple-eared lily below thee; that country and town did
Once encounter in, here coped & poisèd powers;
Thou hast a base and brickish skirt there, sours
That neighbour-nature thy grey beauty is grounded
Best in; graceless growth, thou hast confounded
Rural, rural keeping — folk, flocks, and flowers.
Yet ah! this air I gather and I release
He lived on; these weeds and waters, these walls are what
He haunted who of all men most sways my spirits to peace;
Of realty the rarest-veinèd unraveller; a not
Rivalled insight, be rival Italy or Greece;
Who fired France for Mary without spot.
For Hopkins, Scotus was the “rarest-veined unraveller,” the one who could explain why the physical world felt so spiritually charged. He saw Scotus as a rebel against the more generic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, then the standard in Jesuit training. This appeal to the medieval imagination of Duns Scotus appealed to Newman too.
The correspondence between Newman and Hopkins is relatively small in volume; about forty letters survive, spanning from Hopkins’s student days to the years just before his death. The correspondence begins with a hesitant letter from the twenty-two-year-old Hopkins on 28 August 28 1866. It was sent to Newman at the Birmingham Oratory, confiding his desire to become a Catholic. He was anxious about the practical consequences of doing so, especially the inevitable rift with his parents. Newman was calm and unsentimental. He invited him to the Oratory, advising him that while he was welcome, his home was the right place for him if his parents would have him for the holidays. Not long after, Newman received Hopkins into the Catholic Church.
Following his conversion, Hopkins was somewhat adrift. Newman provided practical support by engaging him to teach at the Oratory School in Birmingham in 1867. Though he taught there for only a few months, the experience allowed him to observe Oratorian life at close quarters. It was not for him. The following year Newman supported Hopkins’ decision to join the Society of Jesus.
Newman wrote to congratulate Hopkins on taking his first Jesuit vows in 1870 and later, in 1877, on his ordination to the priesthood. Even when Hopkins first wrote to Newman about joining the Jesuits, he was aware of his own impulsiveness. A major issue for Hopkins was whether he could or should reconcile his intense artistic drive with the Jesuit discipline. Newman, having navigated his own trials of the soul in relation to religious life, offered pragmatic advice. He identified Hopkins’s tendency to over scrupulosity and warned him not to let Jesuit discipline override his mental health.
Hopkins burned his early poems upon entering the Jesuit novitiate, thinking that secular art was a distraction from God, but Newman’s letters reveal a much more balanced view of how personal talent and religious discipline should fit together. For Newman, writing was a duty. He told Hopkins that his talents were not to be buried. While he did not necessarily enthuse over Hopkins’s radical new poetic style (it was too avant-garde for the elderly cardinal), he encouraged his intellectual activity. Hopkins worried that every minute spent on a sonnet was a minute stolen from his ministry, but Newman reposted that the gentleman and the scholar were valid components of the priest. He encouraged Hopkins to keep his Greek scholarship and his writing alive as a form of service to the Church.
In 1875, forty years after Newman’s traumatic experience of a tempestuous sea, a real shipwreck occurred. The SS Deutschland sank off the English coast. Five Franciscan nuns, exiled from Germany, drowned. Encouraged by his Jesuit superior to write about it, Hopkins broke a seven-year poetic silence and wrote “The Wreck of the Deutschland”. He wrote not only about the nuns, but also about his own conversion, which he framed using Newman’s language of assent. Just as Newman had leaned on the “Pillar of the Cloud” in his storm, the nun in Hopkins’s poem cries out to Christ amid the crashing waves. He describes her voice: “a lioness arose breasting the babble,” finding God not after the storm, but inside it.
They fought with God’s cold—
And they could not and fell to the deck
(Crushed them) or water (and drowned them) or rolled
With the sea-romp over the wreck.
Night roared, with the heart-break hearing a heart-broke rabble,
The woman’s wailing, the crying of child without check—
Till a lioness arose breasting the babble,
A prophetess towered in the tumult, a virginal tongue told.
In the 1880s, when Hopkins was drowning in university responsibilities in Dublin, Newman’s letters became a source of shared misery. Newman had struggled with the bureaucracy and obstruction of the Irish bishops decades earlier when he was setting up the Catholic University of Ireland. His letters during this period are less about ideas and more about frustration and survival. He sympathises with Hopkins in his exhaustion, counselling him that it was reasonable to find his work dispiriting. Even a saint or a cardinal could find religious life deeply frustrating.
In the end, these are two different poetic temperaments. Newman sought a steady, guiding light through a fog of confusion. The journey is linear, cautious, intellectual. He asks not to see the “distant scene”, only one step at a time. Hopkins finds God in a violent, sudden “instress”, a flash of lightning or the quiver of a bird’s wing. In “The World is Charged with the Grandeur of God” (1877), Hopkins presents a God who is not just a light in the distance, but a physical force active in the present moment. He is more like Crashaw.
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed…
For Hopkins, God is Energy. He uses the word “charged” (like electricity). God does not lead him home, he flames out from the very trees and soil around him. The tone is turbulent, rhythmic, strange. “Inscape” captures the unique, jagged signature of God in every created thing. Newman told Hopkins that the world was a series of images leading to truth; Hopkins took found God not only in images, but in the “shook foil” and the “blue-bleak embers” of everyday life. Newman provided the intellectual architecture, the grammar of assent, that allowed Hopkins to immerse himself in the physical world as a valid way to find God.
When Hopkins died of typhoid fever at the age of forty-four on 8 June 1889, his poems were found stuffed into a drawer, unpublished. Newman (then eighty-eight years old) was too frail to attend the funeral, but he wrote a letter to Gerard’s brother. He described Hopkins as “so particularly good”. Newman was one of the few churchmen who understood that Hopkins was not a failed priest or a difficult teacher, but a soul of rare intensity. He recognized that the “instress” which made Hopkins’s poetry so confronting and difficult was the same force that made his sanctity so real. He had watched Hopkins struggle to reconcile his strange genius with his Jesuit life, a struggle Newman understood better than almost anyone else. He himself had been a controversial figure for most of his life. In the end, Newman gave Hopkins the theological and pastoral permission to be a modern poet. He taught him that the search for God was a committed engagement with a world that was charged with meaning.
Newman and the Irish poet Aubrey de Vere shared a lifelong friendship that bridged the worlds of Victorian literature and ecclesiastical activity. de Vere became one of Newman’s disciples and collaborators, particularly during the turbulent years of the Oxford Movement and the founding of the Catholic University of Ireland. They met in 1838 in Oxford during the height of the Tractarian disturbances. He was immediately captivated by Newman’s intellect and charming personality, describing him as a figure of “potent influence” comparable to Edmund Burke.
de Vere was a friend of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, his poetic muse; his spiritual path was steered by Newman. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1838 in Avignon while traveling to Rome with Henry Manning, who was later to become the second Archbishop of Westminster, a man not always sympathetic to Newman.
When in 1854 Newman was appointed Rector of the newly established Catholic University of Ireland, he invited de Vere to join him as the Professor of Political and Social Science. Though de Vere was more focused on writing his poetry than lecturing, his presence provided Newman with a critical intellectual ally at a challenging time. Their relationship is documented in over six hundred letters, housed in the National Library of Ireland, covering topics from theological debate to literary criticism.
Both men were deeply influenced by the Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Coleridge. de Vere acted as a link between the literary circles of Wordsworth and Tennyson and the religious circles of Newman and Manning. He opened for Newman a window into the broader Victorian literary establishment. Newman provided de Vere with the theological framework that defined the latter half of his poetic career. It was Newman’s influence, more than any other, that gave a specific direction to de Vere’s later devotional and historical poetry.
In 1855 de Vere published Poems, a volume presenting Newman as a beacon of intellectual brilliance and a master of the English language. One poem is entitled “To the Rev. John Henry Newman”:
Thy words were as a lantern to my feet…
A light that led me through the shadows dim
To that bright home where Truth and Mercy meet.
In this sonnet, de Vere credits Newman not only with having provided him with intellectual guidance but also with offering him the spiritual map that led him to the Catholic Church. de Vere dedicated this entire collection to Newman. In the preface, he writes of his “deep obligations” to Newman’s writings and personal character.
When Newman died in 1890, de Vere wrote a moving elegy. He focused on Newman’s gentle strength and the way his voice had shaped an entire generation of religious seekers.
Thy work is done: the mid-day heat is past:
Thy toil is o’er: the victory is won:
Thy long day’s march has reached its rest at last:
Thy crown is bright: thy holy race is run.
O great and good! O servant tried and true!
We will not weep thee, though our hearts are sore:
We rejoice to think that thou hast passed the blue
Of heaven’s deep vault, and reached the further shore.
There shalt thou rest in peace for evermore,
Where sorrow is not, nor the sound of sighs:
There shalt thou stand upon the golden floor,
With light eternal in thy patient eyes.
Farewell! a long farewell! yet not for aye:
We hope to meet thee in that land of rest,
Where tears are wiped from every eye away,
And all the faithful are for ever blest.
Newman admired de Vere’s ability to weave the beauty of the old world of Wordsworthian romanticism into the service of the new English Catholicism. When he was writing The Idea of a University, he frequently discussed the role of literature with de Vere, the ideal example of a layman who could bridge the gap between secular culture and religious faith. For de Vere, talking to Newman was like “listening to a musical instrument that responded to every touch of the spirit”.
III Two Twentieth-century Newman Companions
Elizabeth Jennings (1926-2001) lived a century after Newman, but they are linked by their Catholic faith, their intellectual rigour, and their pursuit of “the still point” in a noisy world. Jennings saw Newman not just as a historical figure, but as a spiritual and literary North Star. She was influenced by Newman’s theology and his mastery of prose.
They spent significant portions of their lives in Oxford. Newman’s ghost haunts the hallways of Oriel College and the University Church of St. Mary the Virgin, while Jennings lived a quiet, somewhat reclusive life in Oxford, often writing her verse in its libraries and churches. Jennings’ work echoes Newman’s preoccupation with the “inner landscape” and the struggle to reconcile personal suffering with divine love. She saw him as the patron saint of the Oxford mind, someone who proved that you could be both a rigorous academic and a mystic.
Neither was “flowery” or sentimental. Jennings was part of a movement that favoured plain language and traditional form over neo-romantic excess. She wrote specifically about Newman in her poem “John Henry Newman”, in which she captures his intellectual loneliness and his eventual peace later in life. She admired his “kindly light”. She sees him as a model for the modern intellectual who chooses the torturous path of faith.
You had the scholar’s reach, the poet’s cry,
A mind that moved through shadows to the glare.
Jennings wanted her poems to be “as lucid as glasses of water,” an objective with which Newman, with his concern for truth and clarity, would have resonated.
“Teresa of Avila” is perhaps Jennings’ most powerful religious poem. It bridges her own experience with that of a historical religious figure, much like her admiration for Newman. In this poem, she explores the tension between the physical world and the spiritual “interior castle.”
Spain. The dry dust, the sun’s fierce architecture.
But she within the interior castle stayed.
The mind can build its own enclosure
Where light and dark are equally displayed.
She did not seek the ecstasy of sense,
But waited for the shadow of the soul.
The world was not her home, but evidence
Of something else, a fragment of a whole.
Like Newman, and indeed like Saint Teresa, Jennings did not shy away from the times when God felt absent. Having struggled with mental health throughout her life, she viewed her own psychological pain through the lens of the Cross. Her poems are not sermons; they are small, lived-in moments of “evidence” that point toward a larger truth. Shadows are a necessary part of the spiritual life. Faith is not the absence of darkness; it is the ability to walk bravely through it.
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013), the Nobel-winning Irish poet of “earth and bog”, was, like Newman, a poet of the intellectual imagination. They are connected through University College Dublin (UCD) and the shared lineage of the Catholic intellectual tradition in Ireland.
In “District and Circle” Heaney walks the grounds Newman paced a century earlier. He captures the transition from the noise of the city to the cloistered feel of the university buildings. He describes the “brick-dust” and the “old, cold, stony” atmosphere of UCD. He treats the physical location as a site for “memory and metamorphosis.” As Newman saw the university as a place to transform the mind, Heaney sees the park and the surrounding college as a place where the ordinary Irish experience is elevated into art.
True to The Idea of a University Heaney blends the academic with the creative. While he is not a devotional poet in the strict sense, his work is haunted by the rituals and language of the Catholicism Newman helped structure in Ireland in the mid-1850s. Physical things (bread, water, soil) carry a weight of divine or universal significance.
Heaney defends the utility of the useless, the idea that poetry need not “do” anything practical. He presents poetry as a private communication between the poet’s “inmost self” and the reader’s. Newman House, situated within UCD, was a place where the “Irish mind” finally found a home. He sees himself as part of a lineage that started with Newman’s dream of an educated, articulate Irish laity. Poetry could be a “vowel-meadow” of the English language describing the Irish soul, a “witness” shaping language to bridge the gap between Ireland’s troubled past and a hopeful future.
In the second section of his pilgrimage poem ‘Station Island’, Heaney encounters the ghost of William Carleton, a nineteenth-century writer who, like Newman, battled with the intellectual and religious make-up of the Irish mind, unsophisticated, resistant to challenge. This section deals with the clash between private thought and public dogma. Heaney describes the physical hardship of a pilgrimage, walking on stones, fasting, then pivots to an intellectual “visitation.”
“I’m an educated man,” I said, “and I’ve come
to see the thing through.”
Education is a shield. Heaney is on pilgrimage as a modern intellectual investigating his roots. He is trying to find real assent. The church at UCD, commissioned by Newman, bespeaks the Byzantine and European layer of Irish Catholicism that was the backdrop to Heaney’s education. Irish identity was not only about “the soil” or “the struggle”. It was also a sophisticated intellectual project. Newman had provided the idea of what an educated Irishman could be. Heaney provided the modern voice for that person.
The great moment in ‘Station Island’ occurs in Section XII, at the very end of the pilgrimage. As Heaney is leaving the island, he is accosted by the ghost of James Joyce (another UCD alumnus who wrestled with Newman’s legacy). The ghost gives Heaney a command to value the individual conscience and the intellectual imagination even over collective religious ritual.
The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that keeps its over-all greedy summering
beyond the sills of the world. Then finish
up with a sense of the work done for the work’s sake…
And keep at a tangent.
When they make the circle, break it;
when they say ‘I believe’, say ‘I think’.
Stay clear of the procession.
The university should be a place for the “collision of mind with mind,” not a factory for agreement. Understanding is an end in itself. You do not study to be a useful tool for the State or the Church; you study to enlarge the mind and seek God. Heaney’s journey from the bog to the Newman House at UCD configures the arc of twentieth-century Ireland. He took the raw material of Irish life and refined it, just as Newman had championed.
IV Newman’s Poetic Mark: Ecclesiology, Dogma, Holiness
Two hymns in ‘The Dream of Gerontius’ perform what Newman believed was the purpose of Catholic poetry. These hymns are the pillars of Newman’s dramatic poem. They were written in 1865. They demonstrate the techniques and disciplines he observed in the English Metaphysical poets and their Romantic successors, clarity and economy of expression, power of appeal. Newman identified their concomitant functions within Catholic apologetics and liturgy. They are a call to personal holiness. They are hymns that have secured a place in Christian worship across Christian denominations.
The first is a gemlike statement of Catholic doctrine.
Firmly I believe and truly
God is Three, and God is One;
And I next acknowledge duly
Manhood taken by the Son.
And I trust and hope most fully
In that Manhood crucified;
And each thought and deed unruly
Do to death, as He has died.
Simply to His grace I promise
I will boundlessly resign,
And detest it, if it from me
Steal that holy love of Thine.
And I hold in veneration,
For the love of Him alone,
Holy Church as His creation,
And her teachings as His own.
Adoration aye be given,
With and through the angelic host,
To the God of earth and heaven,
Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
The second unveils the glorious vision of Christian love and salvation.
Praise to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise:
In all His words most wonderful;
Most sure in all His ways.
O loving wisdom of our God!
When all was sin and shame,
A second Adam to the fight
And to the rescue came.
O wisest love! that flesh and blood
Which did in Adam fail,
Should strive afresh against the foe,
Should strive and should prevail;
And that a higher gift than grace
Should flesh and blood refine,
God’s Presence and His very Self,
And Essence all-divine.
O generous love! that He who smote
In man for man the foe,
The double agony in man
For man should undergo;
And in the garden secretly,
And on the cross on high,
Should teach His brethren, and inspire
To suffer and to die.
Praise to the Holiest in the height,
And in the depth be praise:
In all His words most wonderful;
Most sure in all His ways.
The first hymn is spoken by a dying man on earth; the second is sung by the angels in heaven. They present two different perspectives: the human person looking up at God, and the angelic order looking down at the mystery of salvation. The first is an earthly prelude, the second is a heavenly anthem. The first is deeply personal, written in the first-person singular. It is the prayer of a man who is physically failing and must cling to the dogmas of the Church as an anchor. It focuses on assent, the human choice to believe. The second is cosmic. It is sung by angels who do not struggle to believe; they observe God’s economy of salvation at work. They sing of and in adoration, an unending response to God’s creative genius. The first presents the consolation of the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, “Manhood crucified” who understands human suffering, a theology of companionship in death. The second presents the strategy of the Incarnation. The angels marvel at the “loving wisdom” that used the same “flesh and blood” fallen in the Garden of Eden to defeat evil. It is a dramatic theology of restoration. In the first the Church is the teacher and guide to faithful living and dying. In the second the Church delivers the faithful and penitent soul into the presence of God, the “Essence all-divine” that is the Vision Glorious of the Catholic faith.
Reading Hour 