Favorite poems cut through time,
Pierce the mind with thought sublime,
some on nature, love, or life,
God, the soul, or afterlife,
some American, some Christian,
all spring from imagination.
Poetry offers a new awareness of life experience. Each poem is an act of pure creation that captures an essential insight about humanity or the transcendent. A poetic work often reflects the historical age in which it was written. For example, the Book of Psalms exemplifies Hebrew poetry, which is characterized by parallelism, a rhythmic arrangement of thought patterns. The publication of The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri in 1320 signaled the beginning of the Renaissance. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth with their publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798 started English Romanticism. Coleridge considered the purpose of Lyrical Ballads was to establish two principles of poetry: “the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty to the modifying colors of imagination.” Wordsworth saw the nature of romantic poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” which “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity.” The twentieth-century poet T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets explored the questions of time and eternity and their unity in Christ through the Incarnation.
This page also includes writings of the Church Fathers St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Dr. Andrew Minto of Franciscan University. We hope you enjoy these noted selections in Poetry and Prose!
Dante Alighieri – The Divine Comedy
St. Thomas Aquinas – Interpretation of Scripture
St. Augustine of Hippo – Grace and Free Will
Hans Urs von Balthasar – Dare We Hope that All Men Be Saved?
Baseball Poetry and Song
Elizabeth Barrett Browning – Two Sonnets on Love
Samuel Taylor Coleridge – The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
John Donne – For Whom the Bell Tolls, Death Be Not Proud and other Sonnets
Thomas Stearns Eliot – Four Quartets, The Rock, and Murder in the Cathedral
Robert Frost – The Road Not Taken and other poems
Kahlil Gibran – The Prophet On Love
George Herbert – The Pulley
Saint Ignatius of Antioch – Writings of an Early Christian Martyr
John Keats – Robin Hood
Joyce Kilmer – Trees and other poems
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow – The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere
Andrew Marvell – A Dialogue Between the Soul and the Body
Andrew Minto – Liturgy and Scripture
Rainer Maria Rilke – Autumn
Christina Rossetti – The Voice of My Beloved
Saint Teresa of Calcutta – Prose and Poetry
William Shakespeare – The Quality of Mercy
William Wordsworth – The Virgin