American Religious Poetry: The Connecting Thread

I just learned that Marilynne Robinson reviewed Harold Bloom's compilation of American Religious Poetry in the May, 2007 Poetry magazine.

As they say, if you've never read it before, then it's new. She's always worth the read.

There's great lines throughout, for instance:

Those who try to understand religion from an outsider's perspective share the tendency of anthropologists to mistake the limits of their own comprehension for a crudeness, a rudimentary character, in what they observe. Anthropologists now acknowledge this error, if they have not yet learned to avoid it. Those who look from the outside at religion, however, still occupy precisely, and intentionally, the posture of the European Enlightenment, priding themselves on their exasperation at finding the natives so intractably primitive. It is important to remember that religious thought has had brilliant expression throughout world culture, and that the idea of the sacred has refined the sense of the beautiful in every civilization. The very narrow sense in which the word is understood in the public conversation in contemporary America—again, by many of its proponents and defenders as well as by its critics—distracts from the profound resonances of religion throughout history.