St. John Henry Newman's Romance of Dogma: A Reappraisal of His Poems

Abstract

English literary anthologies often feature St. John Henry Newman’s prose but never his poems, despite their reception and influence. Newman himself might approve of this. He viewed poetry as a revelation of personal “character” instrumental to exciting “religious feelings” in the ecclesial controversies of his time, but derogated his own contributions.1 He prioritized other duties above poetry and had little time for revision.2 He confessed he was “not, like [Keble], a poet.”3 Yet, one wonders why Newman’s poems, and not Keble’s, have sustained popularity into the twenty-first century, even if only as church hymns. Further, Newman has exerted significant popular and literary influence on the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries, placing his poems within a definite tradition. The question of the literary merit of Newman’s poetry is not closed and should be revisited to discern between genuine literary judgments given literary criteria