Abstract
This paper is written to show that poetry is not the somewhat sentimental, useless, effeminate, out-of- date thing it is often considered to be, bat a form of literature which gives great help to the Church in broadening, guiding, ennobling the life of man as he struggles through this land of darkness and exile to his true home in heaven.|I am not discussing the poetic values of the Catholic Faith, although that would make a splendid subject for a paper. The vision of the Church, the liturgy of the Church, the far-reaching truths which are the teachings of the Church, are all profoundly poetic. Our Faith, indeed, is without doubt poetry’s strongest bulwark. The old mythologies, which inspired much of the pre-Christian poetry, have died. It is true that Christianity helped to kill them; but even if Christianity had not buried them, they would have sunk into the grave of their own weight long since. They cannot be permanently resurrected again in our present civilization.|Without faith in an after-life of reward and punishment, without belief in the free-will of man and his importance and dignity because of his immortal soul, man and his life ere not worthy subjects for poetry. Strip him of the glories which distinguish him from the animal, and man is no better than the brute. One cannot write great poetry about animals. Picture the tragedies of Sophocles or of Shakespeare written of beings without souls. It is because the will is free, it is because the effects of the choice between moral good and evil last eternally, that the struggle of the drama is so vital.|One could, therefore, write much on the subject of the poetic values of the Catholic Faith. But the following paper is taking the complementary view. That is, it treats of the Catholic values of poetic writings. Catholicism has been an inspiration to poets; poets have been a help to Catholicism. Both of these truths have remained rather obscure in the minds of many. I shall make an effort to remove some of the veil shrouding the second. I shall show especially how poetry helps the Church by siding the intellect to see the great Catholic truths more vividly and by training the emotions to seek their satisfaction in those things and ways which these truths reveal as worthy and noble.