Religion: Poetry of Faith

The greatest writing in human history has been religious writing—though most modern poetry reflects little sense of it. In a natural desire to show that poets and religion have been on speaking terms in the past, mediocre British Poet Alfred Noyes has collected an anthology, The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry (Lippincott; $3.50). In it readers will find such hardy perennials as Chaucer, Dryden, Pope, Francis Thompson.

They will also find an interesting section devoted to non-Catholic poets who, Noyes feels, expressed Catholic thought and Catholic emotion. These include Shakespeare, Donne, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning. Especially timely are the atomic-age overtones in Prayer...

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