In Dogged Loyalty

Many poets, down through the long and rich tradition of poetry in English, have devoted their imaginative energy to questions of God, belief and service. Many of these poems are perhaps the most achieved in the English language and the tradition weaves its way, altering, developing, questioning over the centuries. This book blends a series of essays on the major poets who devoted their work to this tradition, with an invaluable anthology of the poems themselves, thus exploring that golden seam of religious poetry from medieval times to the present. Here is The Dream of the Rood, George Herbert, John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson ...and many more, up to R. S. Thomas and our own times. This book is a treasury of such poetry, and more - it adds studies of the importance of poetry to our and every age, showing how it is an art form we will lose at our peril, and outlining how poetry itself can, through its depth and breadth and honesty, be an impetus back towards faith in our common humanity. It contains essays, poems, written by one who has devoted his own life to poetry, and to the poetry of religion.