Madeleine L’Engle gets one of the “honourary Inklings” spots here on A Pilgrim in Narnia. A mythopoeic writer and creator of fantastic worlds, I know little about her poetry and adult novels. In this essay hosted by the Eclectic Orthodoxy blog, Alana Roberts talks about where L’Engle fits as a Christian poet. This essay is built upon a previous one that is a bit more technical. I hope you enjoy this Friday Feature.
by Alana Roberts
Madeleine L’Engle as a poet doesn’t muddle herself into blah, kneel to politics, or contemplate evil. Yet she will never be considered by such as Harold Bloom to be a first-rate or canonical poet. For one thing, her poetry is flawed. It has virtues, but flaws as well. Not all her word choices are the inevitable choices. In fact, she once began a line with the term, “Aaaaaaargh!” (Perhaps there was an ‘a’ or two more; please don’t make me count!)
These flaws are probably present because, when it came to writing poetry, L’Engle’s method of composition was, scandalously, the irreverent one-off, as she tells her reader in a 1996 Mars Hill Review interview:
ML: Poetry is very different. I’ve written very little poetry since my husband died. Last summer I was traveling in Ireland and Scotland, and I wrote twelve sonnets. They just flowed out…
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Thank you for sharing this. Marvellous – I didn’t realize Madeleine L’Engle wrote poetry. More books to read!
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I’ll second that! (I think I had some vague sense she also wrote poetry, but had never read any – a great introduction!)
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You’ll have to do a L’EngleYear
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Hey, now that’s an idea… 🙂
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Yes – but it could easily take (me) more than a year (even if I had ready access): she wrote a lot! (My copy of Many Waters has a chart of how all sorts of novels and their characters are arranged chronologically and interrelated…!) We listed to a couple of her audiobooks over and over in years gone by.
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Thanks for sharing. The book A Wrinkle in Time gave me one of my first paradigm shifts that I can remember. Interesting to read about her as a poet and the interview.
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I like that you used “shift.” I actually felt my bedroom swarm around me when I read “Swiftly Tilting Planet.” I was apparently an engaged reader.
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