Faith in Poetry

Michael D. Hurley teaches English Literature at the University of Cambridge, where he is a University Lecturer and a Fellow of St Catharine’s College. He is the author of G. K. Chesterton (2012), co-author (with Michael O’Neill) of Poetic Form (2012), editor of the new Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Father Brown Stories, and co-editor (with Marcus Waithe) of Thinking Through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century (2017).

In five beautifully written and tightly argued case studies, Hurley...offers a truly fresh perspective...teasing out tensions, torsions, and transformations across lines of poetry, and performing the virtuoso close readings that constitute the core of each chapter. For all their intense attention to detail, however, these readings never feel claustral; rather, Hurley's richly textured arguments are well-situated within the scholarship and attentive to an array of primary sources. Nor do his chapters simply lurch from poem to poem: the rhythm of Hurley's prose is driven by constant qualification, self-reversal, and anticipated objection, which enliven the book's pace with energy and verve. Hurley's style also illustrates his faith in his audience — as well as his faith in criticism as such. In opting for the elegance of an essayistic style, Hurley trusts that his reader will follow the turns of his argument closely and carefully, as the individual features of each poet emerge.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction: Styling Faith1. William Blake: Destabilized Particulars2. Alfred Tennyson: Word Music3. Christina G. Rossetti: Practically Perfect4. Gerard M. Hopkins: Counter Stress 5. T. S. Eliot: Failing BetterIndex