Jesse Zuba

No more profound and intimate expression of America’s spiritual life can be found than the work of its poets. From Anne Bradstreet to the Beats, from Native American chant and Shaker hymnody to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, religion and spirituality have always been central to American poetry. In this unique anthology, world-renowned scholar Harold Bloom weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice: the searching meditations of Puritan pioneers, the evangelical fervor of the Great Awakenings, the mystical currents of Transcendentalism, the diverse influences of the world religions that have taken root in modern America.

Spanning four centuries and more than 200 poets, American Religious Poems is a bountiful and moving gathering of voices that offers countless moments of inspiration, solace, meditation, and transcendence. The poems in this unprecedented volume are a lasting testimony to the American spirit and its unremitting quest for ultimate truth and meaning.- from the publisher… (mere)

Bloom's Anthology on religious poems is a gathering of over 100 poets plus into a single volume of 600 plus pages. For the most part, the book is designed to select poems that are either religious in nature or use religious words while focusing on other themes. The wide latitude of what constitutes religious poems as selected by both Bloom & Zuba leaves much to be desired. There are some poems selected which are hardly religious like Erdrich's or confused like C K William's or simply downright sloppy like John Ashbury's poem which failed to meet the criteria these two editors had set. They did leave out Spafford's "When Peace Like a River" a deeply religious poem in the late 1800s and Fanny Crosby a well known poetess in her day also in the late 1800s. The reviewer is surprised that a book of this caliber could have been this sloppy in the selections but there are some good jewels in this book, one simply has to find them.… (mere)