David Schurman Wallace at Poetry Magazine:
Who are poetry’s true believers? Its evangelists profess poetry’s power to change us, usually without specifying how—a claim familiar from book-jacket copy. Poets are devoted to their craft, of course, but for most, any question of the spiritual, much less a word as weighty as the divine, is fleeting. Like the rest of the world, poetry is now largely secular. A few religious poets still abide in their cells, but they are an exception, a curiosity that reminds us how the sacred once felt, maybe, if only we ourselves could believe. In “Dear Master,” an essay collected in Night Philosophy (2020), Fanny Howe offers her own condensed prose translation of Friedrich Hölderlin’s poem “Bread and Wine,” torquing an old classic to express her feeling of the present. It begins, “We’ve come too late to know what the gods were, only that they live in another sphere, way off in the universe now, passing sometimes like the sound of thunder.” To take the disappearance of the gods seriously, one had to have taken them seriously in the first place.
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