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In the notes to his epic poem The Anathemata, the great Anglo-Welsh modernist David Jones describes a memory which fed his imagination. 35 years before writing The Anathemata, he was staying in Wales, at Capel Y Ffin. On Christmas Eve, the water supply to the house suddenly ran dry, and Jones and the writer Rene Hague set off to find the source of the mountain-stream which gave the house its water. Right at the source, they found that the stream had been deliberately blocked and diverted, so they freed the waters, and followed those waters back to Capel Y Ffin for Christmas Day. This image of 'freeing the waters' continued to resonate with Jones, and recurs in his work. It comes in The Anathemata as part of a passage rich in water metaphors, full of rivers and fountains and oceans, a passage which culminates in Christ's cry from the cross, as set down in the Good Friday liturgy – 'Sitio' – 'I thirst'. In the preface to this epic poem, Jones writes

        Water is called the matter of the Sacrament of Baptism. Is 
        two of hydrogen and one of oxygen that matter? I suppose 
        so. But a knowledge of the chemical components of this 
        material water should, normally, or if you prefer it, ideally, 
        provide us with further, deeper, and more exciting 
        significances vis-à-vis the sacrament of water, and also, for 
        us islanders, whose history is so much of water, with other 
        significances relative to that.

David Jones believed that the artist, the poet, should be a maker of signs. But writing in 1951, he warned of a growing crisis facing poetry – a crisis of dead or dying signs and symbols. Using the example of the word 'wood' – although it could just as easily be applied to blood, or water – he said

        If the poet writes wood, what are the chances that the Wood 
        of the Cross will be evoked? Should the answer be 'None', 
        then it would seem that an impoverishment of some sort 
        would have to be admitted. It would mean that that 
        particular word could no longer be used with confidence to 
        implement, to call up or to set in motion a whole world of 
        content belonging in a special sense to the mythus of a 
        particular culture and of concepts and realities belonging to 
        mankind as such. This would be true irrespective of our 
        beliefs or disbeliefs. It would remain true even if we were 
        of the opinion that it was high time that the word wood 
        should be dissociated from the mythus and concepts 
        indicated. The arts abhor any loppings off of meanings or 
        emptyings out, any lessening of the totality of connotation, 
        and loss of recession and thickness through.

Perhaps Jones' words were less of a warning, and more of a lament. Once it begins, no poet or educator or politician can stop what Seamus Heaney has called 'the big lightening, the emptying out' of our religious language. In The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill writes of England as 'a nation with so many memorials but no memory.' Could the same be said of the English language itself?  

In the face of this, one might expect poets to be freeing the waters, to be refreshing and reviving the very language they use. Some are, but many others at the cutting edge of poetic writing and criticism rejoice in throwing off the baggage of sign-making and truth-seeking. An editorial in Poetry Review on the legacy of modernism spoke of one of its lasting effects as 'an embargo on the windy abstractions much loved by the 19th Century', and goes on to assert that 'practically all serious poets are still modernists in this sense'. As a warning against religiosity and portentousness, and a yearning for poets to make their ideas concrete, that's fair enough, and pretty much all serious poets would go along with it. But if, as I suspect, words like 'God', 'soul' and 'grace' would be on the list of windy abstractions, then a presumed embargo on those words could be seen as a presumed embargo on many kinds of religious or metaphysical poetry.

If the language of poetry has become parched in our culture, parched of truth or meaning beyond the poem itself, parched of historical associations and resonances, parched of its potential to hold up, as David Jones would see it, 'valid signs', then this is a particular crisis for religious poetry. T. S. Eliot famously said of William Blake that since he worked within no tradition, he had to invent a religion and world view as well as to write original poetry. Eliot disapproved of this, believing that innovation was best confined to the poetry, and that that aim was best achieved by writing within a solid framework, which for him was Anglo-Catholic, Conservative and Royalist, but could equally be Protestant Nonconformist, politically radical and republican – closer to Basil Bunting's framework. But in a parched poetic culture, how can the metaphysical, the theological, the mystical be expressed or even approached? The most widely acceptable term at the moment seems to be 'spiritual'. Poetry can be 'spiritual' without being seen as 'religious'. Indeed, many would argue that all poetry is or should be spiritual. What is 'Spiritual poetry'?

The Scottish composer James MacMillan – with whom I have been working as a librettist and collaborator for the last ten years – has written about the current dominance of 'spiritual' music on the classical scene. He is often grouped with John Tavener, Henryk Gorecki, and Arvo Part – all overtly Christian composers, all commissioned and performed by orchestras across the world, all at the height of their reputation. Does this mean that music is less hostile to the 'religious' than poetry? Less parched even? Well, it doesn‘t take much listening to John Tavener's music to realise that his central vision, the icon of his music, if you like, is that of Christ risen, ascended, glorified. A Russian Orthodox convert, he dislikes western Christianity's focus (as he sees it) on the Cross. Tavener, like Part and Gorecki, has in his music explicitly turned his back on conflict, drama, suffering, and fallenness. One of the most striking aspects of James MacMillan‘s music is that the whole story is there, the whole drama. Christ could not have risen if he had not been crucified first. The battle is ultimately won, but it continues all around us. Truly religious art, truly Christian art – whether music or poetry – must surely live and draw creative breath from that tension, that struggle, that completeness in the midst of incompleteness. 'Spiritual' music, like 'spiritual' poetry, has come to mean a kind of one-dimensional heightened or transcendent experience without any sense of sacrifice or conflict. Even though it is often very accomplished and very beautiful, it has come to mean a flight from reality, an escape from the darkness. T. S. Eliot wrote that 'For the great majority of people who love poetry, 'religious' poetry is a variety of minor poetry: the religious poet is not a poet who is treating the whole subject of poetry in a religious spirit, but […] is leaving out what men consider their major passions, and thereby confessing to his ignorance of them.' Perhaps some of the rather thin art produced in recent years under the banner 'spiritual' deserves to be regarded as 'minor' work. But here I‘m returning to the central question, to use Eliot's definition – how can a contemporary poet 'treat the whole subject of poetry in a religious spirit?'

The philosopher John Millbank argues that 'Poetry is not fiction, but the most intense of real interventions.' He elaborates that

        Of its essence, poetry makes, but it makes only to see 
        further, and to establish something real in the world: real, 
        because it further manifests the ideal and abiding. In this 
        context it can be seen that its unavoidable detour via fiction 
        is paradoxically a sign of its necessary humility: it must, in 
        part, conjecture, since it cannot fully see and create in one 
        simple intuition, like God himself.

I‘m presuming that he means good poetry, or real poetry, or poetry that works. To borrow a word from another philosopher, Catherine Pickstock, I‘ve begun to see poems – and that movement or dynamic within poems – as 'liturgies'. Pickstock uses the word liturgy to analyse our secular culture. She argues that secularism is not built on reason (as is often claimed), but is sustained by myths and rituals which alone secure a substantive emptiness. Just as there were once all-encompassing daily rituals which inculcated a sense of transcendence, so now there are equally all-encompassing rituals which inculcate a sense of a world without mystery, closed in upon itself. Thus, for Pickstock, the central task of philosophical theology becomes one of exposing and decoding these secular myths and rituals. Poems are ritualistic, not read like most prose to follow a story or glean information, poetry is incantatory, thrives on repetition, and is best learnt by heart. If, in this sense, poems too are liturgies, or parts of greater liturgies, then they can be liturgies of profundity, truth and meaning, or empty liturgies. Our choice is not between a seemingly narrow religious poetry or a postmodern writing free from cultural constraints and assumptions. Our choice is which liturgies we choose.

The Australian poet Les Murray has spoken of the defining characteristic of real, whole poetry as 'presence'. Perhaps this is another way of describing John Millbank's 'something real in the world, a further manifestation of the ideal and abiding.' For Murray, as for Millbank, this reality, this presence, is fundamentally Christian. For Murray in particular, it has a sacramental sense, as a Catholic poet who believes in the real presence at the heart of the Mass. But if real, true great poems are 'epiphanies' – a word now regularly used by secular critics to describe what poems can do – then they need to be hard earned epiphanies.

David Jones, who had so acutely described the crisis of religious language in poetry almost half a century ago, did attempt to mark out a way forward too. As a poet, it was natural for him to look for this way forward by burrowing deep into the roots of the language itself. In an essay called 'Art and Sacrament', he said       

        I understand that more than one opinion has prevailed with 
        regard to the etymology of the word religio, but a 
        commonly accepted view is that a binding of some sort is 
        indicated. The same root is in 'ligament', a binding that 
        supports an organ and assures that organ its freedom of use 
        as part of a body. And it is in this sense that I here use the 
        word 'religious'. It refers to a binding, a securing. Like the 
        ligament, it secures a freedom to function. The binding 
        makes possible the freedom. Cut the ligament and there is 
        atrophy – corpse rather than corpus. If this is true, then the 
        word religion makes no sense unless we presuppose a 
        freedom of some sort.

So perhaps to 'free the waters' and help slake the thirst of a parched culture, poets and other artists need religion, need a theology. Now there‘s an unfashionable idea. There‘s a popular view, influenced by Romanticism, that only the pure, unfettered imagination can produce the great work. Poets should not be religious, or overtly political, or committed to anything much outside the poetry. Poets should be freewheeling, freethinking free spirits. As if that meant anything. It chimes with James MacMillan‘s experience of fellow composers feeling that music is complete in itself, and shouldn‘t be sullied by any extra-musical element. It is all about 'the dots on the page'. Well, if David Jones is right, then that image of the free-spirited artist is, and always has been, an illusion. Freedom is not absence. The binding makes possible the freedom. We are all engaged in liturgies, but those liturgies can be empty or profound. Poets can choose, can and should create and recreate. They should kick, rebel, challenge and question, but they cannot opt out. When I think of Jones‘ 'binding to make free', I think of a composer like Olivier Messiaen, whose technical and imaginative virtuosity underlie much of contemporary classical music – inspiring pupils such as Pierre Boulez. But Messiaen is a problem for the likes of Boulez, because his expansive creativity arose out of a very orthodox Catholic Christianity. Post-modernist music critics try to cope with Messiaen by separating his music from his faith, which they regard as a bizarre personal idiosyncrasy. The Welsh poet Waldo Williams described his religion and his native language (he believed the two to be inextricably linked) as 'a large room within narrow walls.' In other words, as with Messiaen, it was a radical freedom won through constraint, a 'binding to make free.‘

And if religious poetry is a radical and liberating act, then how much more radical, and how much more liberating is praise poetry. Those religious poets in the late 20th Century who found praise hard to write – including great religious poets like the English Geoffrey Hill and the American John Berryman – have still found material in the often frustrated desire to praise. The leading Welsh language poet writing today – Bobi Jones – is a convert to that language from a Cardiff English-speaking family. He is also a convert to Calvinism. Both put him in the margins of contemporary western culture, yet he has written a substantial body of work which makes clear his commitment to praise. In his own words : 'Praise continues, even at the deepest level, but it is praise under siege.' In this he is by no means alone in Wales, but the comparison with a literary tradition so close geographically, yet so utterly foreign to English has a particular bearing on praise poetry.

In Bobi Jones' case, praise is not so much a choice as a religious duty. As a Calvinist, the cultural mandate given to man by God in Genesis, emphasises man's purposeful activity on earth, to replenish and fructify it, but above all to praise, serve and enjoy God forever. That a contemporary poet might try to fulfil such a commandment is, depending on your personal beliefs, either crazy or revolutionary. It is certainly no longer a conformist choice. Bobi Jones himself, writing about his formation as a poet, has written about the society around him, and the choices he faced:

        Obviously, the aimlessness could not just be avoided: one 
        could not flee the wilful incomprehensibility or the 
        brainwashing onslaught on order and significant 
        conceptualising: one could not just dump the ironic 
        destruction of family life, the agnostic hatred of Welsh 
        identity, and the whole artistic attempt to reflect or interpret 
        this absurd world with over-modest fidelity. One could not 
        go back. Indeed, my own work was something of an 
        interpretation, but it was also an attempt to free itself 
        without 'escape'. It was a deliberate re-orientation.

 'Freedom without escape', a binding to make free.

Praise poetry is radical for a number of reasons. It is radical because is it is hard to write with authenticity, especially in a language so emptied of religious significance as English. It is radical because it is realistic. It is not optimistic, but as Bobi Jones expresses it, 'praise is the completest refusal I know of the absurd. And it unashamedly and pointedly has a direction.' Commenting on the plight of the religious poet writing in English, as compared to his own Welsh, Bobi Jones picked up on the 'fashionable dryness, which has not always been part of the tradition, and can be almost neurotic.' But he added that 'A dry ironic spell should not necessarily be a bad thing, as long as praise is not permanently inhibited, and as long as poets are permitted once more to stand on their heads.'

My own experience as a poet is that authentic praise is the note I find hardest to strike. I do believe in its radicalism, and in its power when it can be achieved. But writing in English, in a poetic tradition so smashed and uprooted, I have so far not been satisfied with my own attempts at praise. It has crept up on me at times, in poems which were not intended to attempt praise, and I‘ve been surprised to find that note struck as I look back at some of my work. But more often than not, I find as the theologian, poet and Archbishop Rowan Williams has said, that 'the attempt to mend the fracture brings about another fracture'.

Even that fracture can be fruitful though. In a recent lecture, Rowan Williams spoke about two possible strategies by which contemporary poets can write religious poetry. The first is – as many poets have attempted – to try to think or feel yourself into someone else‘s religious sensibility. The second, and to me the most fascinating and most frequently experienced, is the attempt to write into and around the gaps, the fractures, the silence. This will be a religious poetry in which the breakages and shortfalls of the language are significant. They will not always, indeed perhaps rarely, be about religious subject matter, but they will be written in an awareness of silence and tension. As Rowan Williams puts it : 'The articulation of that tension reveals the gap, the pulse, the rhythm.'

So, is David Jones‘ image of walking to the source of that stream above Capel Y Ffin to free the waters still a one resonant half a century on? I think so, not least because however parched our culture might become, there is still water in abundance. The stream has been diverted – perhaps wilfully – but it has not dried up.