ABSTRACT
English Christian Verse contains a useful discussion of the problems of definition: on the one hand, Christian poetry might be “any verse written by a Christian”: on the other the genre might be restricted to “whatever poem purely and deliberately expressed Christianity”. Levi claims that the reader should not demand a “narrow dogmatic rectitude” as a matter of definition, and stresses the point that, if we narrow our definition to poetic expressions of Christian dogma we are left with very little good Christian verse at all. What Levi pinpoints in his Introduction is a continuing problem: anyone wishing to discuss the religious in literature is faced with such questions of definition. Is religious poetry, for example, the same thing as devotional poetry? And what of those poems that begin by praising physical beauty, but go on to transcend it and discuss it in terms of the divine-are these religious poems or “purely” love-sonnets? The selection of books discussed below has been chosen to cover a range of definitions of what “religion” in literature means.
