Meditative poetry combines the religious practice of meditation with verse. Buddhist and Hindu writers have developed extensive theories and phase models for meditation (Bevis 1988; 73-88).
In Christianity, meditation became a major devotional practice during the Middle Ages, closely associated with the life in monasteries. Definitions vary, but there were various attempts to distinguish meditation from contemplation. While meditation focuses the mind on a text, preferably from the Bible, contemplation will take a concrete object, such as a candle, to concentrate the thoughts of the mind. Both contemplation and meditation had the same end, to seek unity with God.
During the Protestant Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Jesuits like Ignatius of Loyola formalized the process of meditation, as a channeling of memory, understanding, and will. His method of meditation fell into three main parts: A) prayer and composition of place; B) the examination of points (analysis); C) the colloquies (the dialogue with God as a climax) (Martz 1962, 27-32). Jesuits brought this practice to England (Daly 1978: 72). Calvinist and other Protestants adapted meditation to Bible studies.
Puritan meditation emphasized self-examination, applying Bible verses to contemporary, everyday life. In 1628, Thomas Taylor wrote a Puritan handbook "Meditation from the Creatures", recommending to include images from the sensible world (metaphorical of God's glory). In colonial New England, Thomas Hooker defined meditation in "The Souls Preparation for Christ" (1632) as follows: "It is a settled exercise for two ends: first to make a further inquiry of the truth: and secondly, to make the heart affected therewith."
In 1648, the "Shorter Catechism of the Westminster Assembly" made meditation a duty for Puritans, and in 1649/50 Richard Baxter 's "The Saints' Everlasting Rest" became the standard Puritan text, at its core prescribing meditation. Like Taylor and Hooker, Baxter admitted the use of the senses; that is, he included contemplation with meditation, based on figural correspondences with the Bible. By including contemplation with meditation, the Puritans laid the foundation for a rich tradition of verse meditation in the USA from its colonial beginnings to the twenty-first century (Daly 1978, 74-76, 79-81; Martz 1962).
Soon Puritan ministers like Edward Taylor began to write meditations in verse, based on lines from the Bible and on sense perceptions, both allegorical of the greater glory of God. Anne Bradstreet provided the first published meditations purely based on the senses, celebrating nature's beauties as the creation of God. Using the analogy of Nature as God's second book, poetic meditations gradually secularized, replacing the old allegoric technique with a more symbolic reading of nature and affirming the self-reliant individual (Pearce 1961, 42-57).
Ralph Waldo Emerson 's essay "Nature" (1836) freed the meditation from its theological underpinnings and its reliance on the Bible. He encouraged poets to view nature as a storehouse of symbols that they could use merely relying on their imagination. Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson took meditation into this direction and paved the way for Modernist and Postmodernist practices in poetry (Lawson 1994).
The method of the three main steps (the composition of place, examination of points, colloquies) had survived into the twentieth century in many poems, as had the devotional practice of verse meditation. Leading modernist poets like T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens began to fragmentize the process, blending thoughts and sense perceptions in a sort of spiritual diary (Parini 1993,12). Postmodernist poets like John Ashbery deconstruct the contemplative aspect, the reference of the poem to an object outside itself, dissolving narrative or episodic structures of the spiritual diary in an ironic and open association (Bevis 1988:280-90), and thereby turning the poem itself into the object the reader can use for contemplation or meditation.
Meditative poetry has often been correlated to Relaxation Through Poetry, which is simply using poetry to relax or relieve stress whenever someone is in need. It can also be seen in group visualization sessions where a speaker tries to get the audience to forget all about their stress by the use of calm and relaxing poetry.
Bibliography
Bevis, William W. "Mind of Winter. Wallace Stevens, Meditation, and Literature." Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1988.
Daly, Robert. "God's Altar. The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry." Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1978.
Martz, Louis. "The Poetry of Meditation. A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century." 1954. Rev. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962.
Meditation is a practice where an individual uses a technique – such as mindfulness, or focusing the mind on a particular object, thought, or activity – to train attention and awareness, and achieve a mentally clear and emotionally calm and stable state. Scholars have found meditation elusive to define, as practices vary both between traditions and within them.
Thomas Traherne was an English poet, clergyman, theologian, and religious writer. The intense, scholarly spirituality in his writings has led to his being commemorated by some parts of the Anglican Communion on 10 October or on September 27.
Anne Bradstreet was the most prominent of early English poets of North America and first writer in England's North American colonies to be published. She is the first Puritan figure in American Literature and notable for her large corpus of poetry, as well as personal writings published posthumously.
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Edward Taylor was of English origin and a colonial American poet, pastor and physician. His work remained unpublished for some 200 years but since then has established him as one of the foremost writers of his time. His poetry has been characterized as "American Baroque" as well as Metaphysical.
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Christian poetry is any poetry that contains Christian teachings, themes, or references. The influence of Christianity on poetry has been great in any area that Christianity has taken hold. Christian poems often directly reference the Bible, while others provide allegory.
Buddhist meditation is the practice of meditation in Buddhism. The closest words for meditation in the classical languages of Buddhism are bhāvanā and jhāna/dhyāna.
Christian meditation is a form of prayer in which a structured attempt is made to become aware of and reflect upon the revelations of God. The word meditation comes from the Latin word meditārī, which has a range of meanings including to reflect on, to study, and to practice. Christian meditation is the process of deliberately focusing on specific thoughts and reflecting on their meaning in the context of the love of God.
In Western Christianity Lectio Divina is a traditional monastic practice of scriptural reading, meditation and prayer intended to promote communion with God and to increase the knowledge of God's word. In the view of one commentator, it does not treat scripture as texts to be studied, but as the living word.
A spiritual practice or spiritual discipline is the regular or full-time performance of actions and activities undertaken for the purpose of inducing spiritual experiences and cultivating spiritual development. A common metaphor used in the spiritual traditions of the world's great religions is that of walking a path. Therefore, a spiritual practice moves a person along a path towards a goal. The goal is variously referred to as salvation, liberation or union. A person who walks such a path is sometimes referred to as a wayfarer or a pilgrim.
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Anne de Marquets was a French Catholic nun and poet from Poissy. She was likely born around 1533 in the Comté d'Eu of a noble family.
Prayer has been an essential part of Christianity since its earliest days. As the Middle Ages began, the monastic traditions of both Western and Eastern Christianity moved beyond vocal prayer to Christian meditation. These progressions resulted in two distinct and different meditative practices: Lectio Divina in the West and hesychasm in the East. Hesychasm involves the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, but Lectio Divina uses different Scripture passages at different times and although a passage may be repeated a few times, Lectio Divina is not repetitive in nature.
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