Journal Article

A Form of (Spiritual) Knowing: Word-Music and the Verticality of Prayer in George MacDonald

Vernon, Amanda B

2021

Overview

Critical work on nineteenth-century religious and poetic form has, by and large, focused its attention upon a horizontal plane, tending to discuss the ways in which prayer and poetry functioned as modes of expression or unification for poets and readers. It has, however, rarely ventured into an exploration of what Victorian writers and readers understood to be happening vertically. In the main, Christians understand prayer to be a communication with God—a vertical activity that moves both up (in human expression) and down (in divine action or communication). Given the close connection between nineteenth-century religion and poetic form, the question arises as to what Victorians might have understood to be happening vertically, not only in the act of prayer but also in the writing or reading of poetry. This essay takes the novelist and literary scholar George MacDonald as a case study for thinking about how a vertical conception of prayer can open up new ways of thinking about the relation between nineteenth-century literary and religious forms—in particular, the theological work that nineteenth-century writers understood poetic form to be capable of doing. To this end, it examines MacDonald's notion of poetic \"word-music\" and its role in the communication of spiritual knowledge. It begins by exploring MacDonald's understanding of the relationship between feeling and spiritual knowledge before moving on to demonstrate how, for him, poetry's capacity to convey meaning through its prosody makes it particularly suited to the communication of spiritual knowledge. Through its vertical reading of MacDonald, this essay illuminates nineteenth-century attitudes toward literary form and prayer more generally and invites us to reimagine what a vertical conception of spiritual knowledge offers to the way we understand the relation between religious and literary form in the Victorian period.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: 19th century / Attitudes / Case studies / Christianity / Communication / God / Knowledge / Literary language / MacDonald, George (1824-1905) / Music / Poetry / Prayer / Prosody / Readers / Reading / Reading-writing relationship / Religion / Religious literature / Spirituality / Theology / Victorian period