John in the Company of Poets: The Gospel in Literary Imagination

Acknowledgments

ix = Acknowledgments Esther Richey has been part of this project from its very beginning, encouraging me, reading drafts, helping me to see what I had written. I am very grateful . I have been fortunate to read the Gospel over the years with John and Linda Tyson, Chris and Kirstan Hutchinson, David Poteet, and others. Chris Hutchinson, Laura Gardner, William and Marion Gardner, Fritz Oehlschlaeger , John Wheatcroft, Fred Carlisle, and Robert Siegle read the manuscript and offered useful suggestions. Carolyn Rude, my Department Chair during the writing of this book, has been a constant source of support and encouragement . Roger Lundin, Carey Newman, and two anonymous readers from Baylor University Press helped shape the book in important ways. I have dedicated this book to my students at Virginia Tech for a number of reasons. Years ago, I first saw the possibility of such an approach to the Gospel in a class I was teaching on biblical and classical backgrounds to literature. More recently, and more soberly, I was privileged to experience in the final classes I taught after the terrible events of April 16, 2007, in Blacksburg, in which thirty-two students and faculty were killed and many others wounded, the power of poetry to lead us through our inner lives. How fortunate my students and I felt, after passing through that almost unspeakable series of events, to have in common a number of poems that allowed us to draw close and speak and begin to find ourselves again. Imagine, if you would, the great gift it was to turn to Emily Dickinson’s “After great pain, a formal feeling comes— / The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs—,” to know that poem in advance and be able to walk through its drama once again at such a time and in such company. I have written this book with those classes in mind, seeking x John in the Company of Poets to make the various dramas I unfold as clear as possible, trusting them to speak into contexts I cannot on my own even imagine. I am grateful for permission to reprint the following material: Scripture taken from the New American Standard Bible, ©1960, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, by the Lockman Foundation, Used by permission. “The Sabbath Poems 1979, II.” Copyright © 1998 by Wendell Berry from A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979–1997. Reprinted by permission of Counterpoint. “Ecce Homo” from Collected Poems 1937–1971 by John Berryman. Copyright © 1989 by Kate Donahue Berryman. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Reprinted as well by permission from Faber and Faber Ltd. “A Miracle for Breakfast,” “Squatter’s Children,” excerpt from “Poem,” and excerpt from “Roosters” from The Complete Poems 1927–1979 by Elizabeth Bishop. Copyright © 1979, 1983 by Alice Helen Methfessel. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. F336 “Before I got my eye put out,” F962 “A Light exists in Spring,” and F1715 “A word made Flesh is seldom.” Reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst College from The Poems of Emily Dickinson : Variorum Edition, edited by Ralph W. Franklin, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1951, 1955, 1979, 1983 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Excerpt from “Ash Wednesday” in Collected Poems 1909–1962 by T. S. Eliot, copyright © 1930 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1958 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Excerpt from “Burnt Norton” in Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, copyright© 1936 by Harcourt, Inc. and renewed 1964 by T. S. Eliot. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Excerpts from “Ash Wednesday” and “Burnt Norton” by T.S. Eliot also reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd. Acknowledgments xi “Directive” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1947, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright© 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC. “Noli Me Tangere” from The End of Beauty by Jorie Graham. Copyright © 1987 by Jorie Graham. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers. “Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus: Agnus Dei” by Denise Levertov. From The Selected Poems of Denise Levertov. Copyright © 1982 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Additional permission from Bloodaxe Books, Denise Levertov, New...