Chapters into Verse: A Selection of Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible from Genesis through Revelation

Robert Atwan · Laurance Wieder

Sep 2000 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

Drawing a unique map of the history of English poetry, Chapters Into Verse surveys and defines the literary legacy of the Scriptures from the fourteenth century to the present. Arranged in scriptural order from Genesis to Revelation, the book presents each poem alongside the biblical passage that inspired it. Thus readers can conveniently witness the various ways sacred text has sparked the imagination of poets throughout the ages. The editors have included poems by virtually all the prominent religious poets--among them John Donne, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, Edward Taylor, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Included, too, are devotional and visionary works from a wide range of vintage poets--Robert Burns, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. Proving that the Bible is just as powerful a source of inspiration today as it was in the past, the collection also assembles a mixed congregation of modern and contemporary poets, such as Dylan Thomas, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Countee Cullen, e.e. cummings, William Butler Yeats, Laura (Riding) Jackson, A.D. Hope, Denise Levertov, and Philip Levine. Of enduring interest to readers of both scripture and literature, this anthology illuminates key passages of the Old and New Testament. In selection after selection, readers will encounter an astonishing variety of religious experiences, as a host of poets from many eras and many backgrounds respond to Holy Scripture profoundly and imaginatively.

Ratings and reviews

"Chapters Into Verse: A Selection" [CV-S] is a "brief" (517 page!) selection of poems drawn from the larger (800+ pp) two-volume "Chapters Into Verse" [CV-I & CV-II], which offers English-language poems based on the Hebrew Bible/First Christian Testament (in CV-I) and the Christian New Testament (in CV-2). The introduction to CV-S, available as a free sample on Google books "play" app, discusses the editors' rational and relationship of this project to other of their Biblical poetry efforts. At less than half the price of either of the original volumes, the e-book edition of CV-S offers an exceptional introduction to English poetry of the last few centuries.

About the author

Robert Atwan is founder and series editor of The Best American Essays and co-editor of Divine Inspiration (OUP 1998) Laurance Wieder is a poet and the editor of The Poets' Book of Psalms (OUP 1999).