At the beginning of the second fifty years of this fine journal, perhaps it is timely to look both back and forward by way of suggesting possible directions for the future of our joint mission as scholars of Christianity and literature. It is indeed a daunting task: to scan the broad expanse of recent scholarship, assess the symptoms and drift of our profession, and then offer up, as my title presumptuously puts it, some prospects for the future. However, that is the assigned task at hand, and so it is with genuine fear and trembling that I offer up these pages. I should also say that, when I must illustrate my points with specific literary examples, these will almost all be from my own field of American literature. I am certain that my colleagues in British and other national literatures in English could provide many more examples of whatever I may be describing; rather than attempt what I am simply not capable of producing, I will leave that task to others more knowledgeable than myself. Thus do I begin somewhat apologetically, begging the reader's kind patience.
Poets have commonly speculated about the purposes and effects of their works. Perhaps most famously, the British Romantics posited a version of the poet as prophetic mouthpiece of God. In Percy Bysshe Shelley's memorable formulation, "Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present. ... the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" ("Defense" 1087). In America, this lofty concept of the poet was taken up by the likes of Ralph Waldo Emerson:[The Poet] stands among partial man for the complete man .... The poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the centre.... whenever we are so finely organized that we can penetrate into that region where the air is music, we hear those primal warblings, and attempt to write them down. (242,244) Walt Whitman took seriously Shelley's and Emerson's pronouncements, audaciously claiming, ''American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people.... His spirit responds to his country's spirit.... he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes" (713). Although Victorian types like the Fireside Poets, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier, were somewhat more restrained, they still saw their poetic works as contributing to both the democratization and ethical progress of America-and the world.Opposed to these nineteenth-century tendencies was a more archly modern view, which tended to dismiss romantic ideas about art. Instead, modernists attempted to create what Richard Poirier once called a "world elsewhere;' meaning in part that properly modernist poets were uninterested 297
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