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In her statement, ‘To the Reader’ in Collected Poems (1991; 1938), Laura Riding writes at first as if poetry, the realization of the creative impulse, is similar to the realization of the religious impulse except that poetry is non-spiritual: ‘Poetry made itself the secular twin of religion.’ And then, as she develops her theme, Riding begins to recognize explicitly what she must have known intuitively: writing poetry is itself a spiritual activity. She states: 

But its secularity has not been of a ‘worldly’ cast.
Rather than endeavoring to serve as a ritual of
spirituality symbolic of the religiously serious,
a process of metaphorical imitation of it, a ‘mere’
art, it has, except in vulgar conception and practice,
endeavored to serve as an area for the exercise of
spiritual consciousness as a directly, personally
possessed human function, not just a derivative
of a mysterious condition of spiritual blessedness.

That is, poetry is not a representation of some other kind of spirituality, and it is not derived from some other spiritual source. Poetry is the expression of its own spirituality, a spirituality that is not divine but innately human: ‘a directly, personally possessed human function’. And in her next sentence, as if to clarify her view beyond all possible ambiguity, she states: ‘Poetry, that is, made itself a charter of the internal, personally independent spirituality of the human being.’

Riding is then led to the view that theistic religion separates one part of the self from another and requires what she calls the soul to act as an intermediary between the parts of the divided self, whereas the spirituality expressed through poetry is an enlightening and unifying force:

Where religion dealt with the separation of a
spiritual part from the mixed body-and-soul,
or mixed body-and-mind, with the soul as
intermediary factor, poetry gave the spiritual
element the role of a teaching presence in
the complex composition of the individual

Poetry can achieve such unity more readily than religion, because poetry is often a fusion of the religious and creative impulses brought about by the creative poetic imagination. Riding’s view is similar to one concept of Christianity: Christ’s role is to act as intermediary between humans and God, and to persuade humans that the God they once dared not approach directly because he was so vengeful and irascible is now a God of love. But if we accept that religion and spirituality are innate human forces, and that these forces can be realized through poetry, then there is no need for an intermediary because there is no God.

Riding states that, as expressions of spirituality, poetry and religion have developed
in different ways:

Poetry may be described as an institution devoted
to the pursuit of spiritual realism, in relation to
religion as an institution devoted to the pursuit of
spiritual idealism. For those to whom the spiritual
nature of the human being calls for literal expression,
living fulfilment, there presses a sense of necessity
of choice between poetry and religion – the quality
of the urgency determines the choice.

Poetry or religion? Riding’s phrase, ‘the quality of the urgency’, suggests that there are two kinds of spirituality: one emerges from the religious impulse alone and is expressed through theistic religion; the other emerges from the creative impulse, and thus from the innate, non-theistic religious impulse, and is expressed through poetry. Riding clearly implies that, in the mind of an individual, the two are unequal forces and that the stronger, the one with the greater quality of urgency in the individual mind, will prevail. One can readily picture someone in whom only the religious and not the creative impulse is active; it is more difficult to picture a creative artist in whose mind there is no religious impulse, no sense of the sacred, no need to celebrate mysteries. By Riding’s argument, poetry can be the ‘literal expression, living fulfilment’ of ‘the spiritual nature of the human being’. In the act of writing a poem, the poet can express the creative and the religious impulses in such a way that creativity and spirituality are one. And this raises the question: Can poetry be regarded as a form of religion?

* * * * *

In stanza VII of ‘Resolution And Independence’, which was probably completed in 1802, William Wordsworth writes of Thomas Chatterton and poets generally: ‘By our own spirits are we deified.’ That is, poets, through their spiritual act of making poems, are god-like. In Book XIV, the Conclusion to The Prelude, which was probably completed in 1805, Wordsworth writes of love as a sacred element, ‘Bearing a tribute to the Almighty’s Throne,’ and then he adds:

This spiritual Love acts not nor can exist
Without Imagination, which, in truth,
Is but another name for absolute power
And clearest insight, amplitude of mind,
And Reason in her most exalted mood.

If imagination is another name for absolute power, then imagination rivals, or even displaces, the Almighty. In their devotional poems, none of Wordsworth’s predecessors John Donne, John Milton, George Herbert, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Thomas Traherne makes such a claim.

Matthew Arnold in ‘The Study Of Poetry’ in Essays In Criticism, Second Series, (1888) makes the prediction: ‘More and more mankind will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us.’ His prediction has proved wrong, of course. In his next sentence, he makes the further prediction: ‘Without poetry, our science will appear incomplete; and most of what now passes with us for religion and philosophy will be replaced by poetry.’ An exclusively scientific view of life is clearly incomplete, but Arnold states that religion, which claimed and still claims to offer a whole view of life, and perhaps of an afterlife, will be replaced by poetry. And in the same para-graph he says of religion and philosophy: ‘what are they but the shadows and dreams and false shows of knowledge?’ Arnold is less than absolute in his claims; he states that he is speaking of religion as he sees it in the late nineteenth century; but he clearly believes that poetry would, and should, replace religion.

The contention - Poetry or religion? - continues. Stephen Spender sees the making of poems as a spiritual activity, but he does not claim that poetry is a religion. In the chapter, ‘The New Orthodoxies’ in The Creative Element (1953), he reaches a conclusion similar to Matthew Arnold’s when he writes: ‘Although poetry cannot be a substitute for religion the poetic function tends to become a substitute for defective spiritual institutions.’ That is, poetry can replace what William James calls ‘religion as an institutional, corporate, or tribal product.’

Four American poets, by contrast, make the equation: Poetry is religion. In his extended essay, ‘Poetry And Imagination’, Emerson writes: ‘Poetry is inestimable as a lonely faith, a lonely protest in the uproar of atheism.’ William Carlos Williams in ‘Notes In Diary Form’ (1927) in Selected Essays (1969; 1954), writes:

The only human value of anything, writing included,
is intense vision of the facts. God - sure if it mean
sense. ‘God’ is poetic for the unobtainable. Sense
is hard to get but it can be got. Certainly that
destroys ‘God’, it destroys everything that
interferes with simple clarity of apprehension.

The concept of God is acceptable if it makes sense, but God is unobtainable; and when sense, that is, meaning and understanding, is attained, it destroys God. Williams’ words are chiastic but his point is clear: God is displaced by a human, and humanist, vision life.

Conrad Aitken goes further: poetry not only displaces God; it can deify humans. In his essay, ‘Poetry And The Mind Of Modern Man’, in Poets On Poetry edited by Howard Nemerov (1966), Aitken speaks of the power of poetry and concludes: ‘In the evolution of man’s consciousness, ever widening and deepening and subtilizing his awareness, and in the dedication of himself to this supreme task, man possesses all that he could possibly require in the way of a religious credo …’ And in a conclusion that echoes Wordsworth’s ‘By our own spirits are we deified’ Aitken writes of the poet: ‘when the half-gods go, the gods arrive; he can, if he only will, become divine.’

Wallace Stevens enters the debate in prose and in poetry. In ‘Adagia’ in Opus Posthumous (1957), Stevens’ aphorisms include these: ‘After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.’ And ‘God is a symbol for something that can as well take other forms, as, for example, the form of high poetry.’ In Section V of his poem, ‘The Man With The Blue Guitar’, Stevens writes:

The earth, for us, is flat and bare.
There are no shadows. Poetry

Exceeding music must take the place
Of empty heaven and its hymns,

Ourselves in poetry must take their place

And in Stevens’ ‘Final Soliloquy Of The Interior Paramour’ there is the line that partly echoes Wordsworth’s of imagination as an absolute power: ‘We say God and the Imagination are one.’

For Wordsworth, Arnold, Williams, Aitken and Stevens, the sacred impulse that compels them to make poems is a more powerful force than their worship of God.