Christian poetry is any poetry that contains Christian teachings, themes, or references. The influence of Christianity on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has taken hold. Christian poems often directly reference the Bible, while others provide allegory.
Early history
Poetic forms have been used by Christians since the recorded history of the faith begins. The earliest Christian poetry, in fact, appears in the New Testament. Canticles such as the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, which appear in the Gospel of Luke, take the Biblical poetry of the psalms of the Hebrew Bible as their models. Many Biblical scholars also believe that St Paul of Tarsus quotes bits of early Christian hymns in his epistles. Passages such as Philippians 2:5-11 (following) are thought by many Biblical scholars to represent early Christian hymns that were being quoted by the Apostle:
Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus:Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God:But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men:And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross.Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth;And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (KJV)
A fuller appreciation of the formal literary virtues of Biblical poetry remained unavailable for European Christians until 1754, when Robert Lowth (later made a bishop in the Church of England), kinder to the Hebrew language than his own, published Praelectiones Academicae de Sacra Poesi Hebraeorum, which identified parallelism as the chief rhetorical device within Hebrew poetry.
In the Syriac language, the 4th-century poet and Deacon St. Ephrem the Syrian, in addition to being a Christian poet comparable to Dante Alighieri, is also credited as the founder of the School of Nisibis, which, in later centuries, became the main centre of learning of the Syriac Christian tradition. He is revered as a great poet and theologian by all traditional Christian church denominations and was declared a Doctor of the Church in the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.
Within the world of classical antiquity, Christian poets often struggled with their relationship to the existing traditions of Greek and Latin poetry, which were of course heavily influenced by paganism. Paul quotes the pagan poets Aratus and Epimenides in Acts 17:28: "For in him we live, and move, and have our being: as certain also of your own poets have said, 'For we are also his offspring.'" Some early Christian poets such as Ausonius continued to include allusions to pagan deities and standard classical figures and allusions continued to appear in his verse. Other Christian poems of the Late Roman Empire, such as the Psychomachia of Prudentius, cut back on allusions to Greek mythology, but continue the use of inherited classical forms.
Other early Christian poets were more innovative. The hymnodist Venantius Fortunatus wrote a number of important poems that are still used in the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church, such as the Vexilla Regis ("The Royal Standard") and Pange, lingua, gloriosi proelium certaminis ("Sing, O my tongue, of the glorious struggle"). From a literary and linguistic viewpoint, these hymns represent important innovations; they turn away from Greek prosody and instead seem to have been based on the rhythmic marching songs of the Roman legions.
A related issue concerned the literary quality of Christian scripture. Most of the New Testament was written (or translated from Semitic languages) in a sub-literary variety of koinê Greek, as was the Septuagint, the Pre-Christian translation of the Old Testament into Greek. The Old Latin Bible added further solecisms to those found in its source texts.
None of the Christian scriptures were written to suit the tastes of those who were educated in classical Greek or Latin rhetoric. Educated pagans, seeing the sub-literary quality of the Christian scriptures, posed a problem for Christian apologists: why did the Holy Ghost write so badly? Some Christian writers flatly rejected classical standards of rhetoric, such as Tertullian, who famously asked, "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?"
The cultural prestige of classical literary languages was not so easy for other Christians to overcome. St. Jerome, trained in the classical Latin rhetoric of Cicero, observed that dismay over the quality of existing Latin Bible translations was a major motivating factor that induced Pope Damasus I to order him to translate the Vulgate, which went on to become the standard Latin Bible, and was used by the Roman Catholic Church in the Tridentine Mass until the Second Vatican Council. In the Anglosphere, vernacular translations of the Christian Bible approved for the reading of the Pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic laity were the Douay-Rheims and the mid-20th-century translation by Monsignor Ronald Knox.
In many European vernacular literatures, Christian poetry appears among the earliest monuments of those literatures, and Biblical imitations and paraphrases often preceded Bible translations. Much Old Irish poetry was both composed and collected by Irish monks, such as Dallán Forgaill, Óengus of Tallaght, and Beccán mac Luigdech, and is on religious themes.
Even during the 20th-century, after hearing Sean-nós singer Joe Heaney’s first public performance in Dublin of a famous work of oral poetry in the Irish language about the Crucifixion of Jesus and the grief of His Blessed Mother from the Connemara oral tradition, Máirtín Ó Cadhain, a highly important figure to Modern literature in Irish, wrote, "In Caoineadh na dtrí Muire he brings home to us the joys and sorrows of Mary with the intimacy and poignancy of a Fra Angelico painting."Caoineadh na dtrí Muire, Cartlanna Sheosaimh Uí Éanaí.
By introducing the rules of Old Irish vernacular prosody into Ecclesiastical Latin, Irish monks, including St Columba, Columbanus, Coelius Sedulius, Adamnan, Virgilius Maro Grammaticus, and John Scotus Eriugena, produced many immortal works of religious poetry in a new dialect now termed Hiberno-Latin. This story is repeated in most European languages.
In Old English poetry, the Dream of the Rood, an iconic work of dream vision poetry on Christ's crucifixion which adapts the conventions of Pagan Germanic epic poetry and applies them to Jesus, is one of the earliest extant monuments of Anglo-Saxon literature. The Old Saxon Heliand similarly dates from the Christian mission to and the conversion of the Germanosphere, but is much longer and also takes in the whole of Jesus' life and ministry.
In Armenian literature, by far the most important Christian poet is St. Gregory of Narek, who was a priest and monk at Narek Monastery near Lake Van during the 10th century. Other highly important Armenian Christian poets include Nerses Shnorhali and Grigor Magistros.
The Tale of Igor's Campaign (Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ), an epic poem in Old East Slavic, describes a failed raid made in the year 1185 by a Christian army led by Prince Igor Svyatoslavich of Novhorod-Siverskyi, in the Chernihiv Oblast of modern Ukraine, against the Polovtsians (Cumans), Pagan Turkic nomads living along the southern banks of the Don River. Since its 18th-century rediscovery in a 15th-century monastic manuscript from Yaroslavl and 1800 publication by Aleksei Musin-Pushkin, The Lay, which is often compared with both The Song of Roland and the Finnish Kalevala, has inspired many other poems, art, and, in Classical music, the opera Prince Igor by Mighty Handful composer Alexander Borodin. It is claimed by Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians as a national epic, and has accordingly wielded an enormous influence upon the literature and culture in all three nations. Particularly due to its publication having influenced both Taras Shevchenko, the national poet of Ukraine, and Alexander Pushkin, his counterpart during the simultaneous Golden Age of Russian Poetry. In the Anglosphere, even though its other translators have included Vladimir Nabokov, the literary translation most faithful to both the meaning and poetic form of the original, was produced in a collaboration between Canadian university professors Watson Kirkconnell and C.H. Andrusyshen.Selected and translated into English Verse by C.H. Andrusyshen and Watson Kirkconnell (1963), The Ukrainian Poets: 1189-1962, University of Toronto. pp. 3-21.
The Canticle of the Sun was composed by Saint Francis of Assisi in the Umbrian dialect of the Italian language, but has since been translated into many languages. It is believed to be among the first works of literature, if not the first, written in the Italian language rather than in Latin.
Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy represents one of the earliest examples of Italian poetry in the Italian language.
The Renaissance
The Council of Florence in 1439 led to temporary reunion between the Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox Churches. The Fall of Constantinople in 1453, however, sent many Greek people fleeing to Western Europe as refugees and bringing Ancient Greek books and manuscripts with them that Western Christians had been previously unable to access. As this was during the Gutenberg Revolution, these books were mass-produced and gave impetus to the Renaissance, but also caused many intellectuals, writers, and poets to embrace a nostalgia for Classical mythology and an antipathy for Christianity.
At the same time, however, many European poets adapted the conventions of Ancient Greek and Roman epic poetry to retelling of stories from the Christian Bible. The usual practice in Renaissance humanist poetry was to choose the New Testament for a source. Another highly popular alternative was verse dramas which revived Aristotle's three Classical unities, as is particularly seen in Spanish Golden Age theatre.
In 1535, Marco Girolamo Vida, a Bishop of the Catholic Church in Italy and Renaissance Humanist, published the Christiad, an epic poem in six cantos about the life and mission of Jesus Christ, which is modeled upon the poetry of Virgil and was written at the request of Pope Leo X. According to Watson Kirkconnell, the Christiad, "was one of the most famous poems of the Early Renaissance". Furthermore, according to Kirkconnell, Vida's, "description of the Council in Hell, addressed by Lucifer, in Book I", was, "a feature later to be copied", by Torquato Tasso, Abraham Cowley, and by John Milton in Paradise Lost. The standard English translations, which render Vida's poem into heroic couplets, were published by John Cranwell in 1768 and by Edward Granan in 1771.Watson Kirkconnell (1952), The Celestial Cycle: The Theme of Paradise Lost in World Literature with Translations of the Major Analogues, University of Toronto Press. Page 546.
Marko Marulić, a Croatian lawyer and Renaissance Humanist, defied the usual practice of Christian epic poetry at the time by choosing to retell stories from the Old Testament instead of the New. In 1517, Marulic finished writing the Davidiad an epic poem in Virgilian Latin in 14 books, which retells the life of King David, whom Marulić depicts, in keeping with Catholic doctrine, as a prototype for Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, the Davidiad was long considered to be lost. A manuscript was re-discovered only in 1924, only to be lost again and re-discovered in 1952.