POETRY OF GOD
Frank England, honorary research associate, The Department for the Study of Religions,
University of Cape Town
Monday 20–Friday 24 January 9.15 am COURSE FEES R550; Staff and students R275
In a modern era of divine displacement and sacred absence, this course seeks to discover intimations of the numinous on a journey with five twentieth-century poets. From the search for a peace that passes all understanding in a post-war ‘waste land’, through the rigours of purgatorial pilgrimage to the modern cityscapes of squandered desires, loneliness and spiritual failure, graced lives appear as rather distant afterthoughts and fractured memories. But if faint echoes of the transcendent may still be heard, then the question is posed as to where sacred presence could be found or reimagined in the unhallowed void and transience of secular human existence.
Lecture titles
- The search for God: ‘The Waste Land’ by T.S. Eliot
- The pathway to God: ‘Station Island’ by Seamus Heaney
- The presence of God: ‘New Year Letter’ by W.H. Auden
- The failure of God: ‘In This City’ by Stephen Watson
- The rumour of God: ‘The Echoes Return Slow’ by R.S. Thomas
Recommended reading
The poems or volumes of poems as listed above.
TO BOOK: https://www.webtickets.co.za/v2/performance.aspx?itemid=1554721749
Dr Frank England is an honorary research associate in the Department for the Study of Religions at UCT. His Summer School lecture series, Fictions of God (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock), was published in 2020.