Literature is art made out of words – verbal art. The words of a poem, a novel, a play, a spiritual meditation, are the medium for imagination. Images, metaphors, the sound and music of words open our imaginations and our hearts, so that reading and writing become, not simply analytic exercises, but a way of prayer.
My courses in literary arts at Wesley invite students to discover the religious imagination at work in verbal art, and to draw on their own imaginative response to literature to move toward deeper spiritual and theological insight. The poet Denise Levertov provides a guiding principle when she writes
"Poems present their testimony as circumstantial evidences, not as closing argument. Where Wallace Stevens says, "God and the imagination are one," I would say that the imagination, which synergizes intellect, emotion and instinct, is the perceptive organ through which it is possible, though not inevitable, to experience God." From "A Poet's View", in New & Selected Essays (New Directions, 1992), pp. 245-6.
Dr. Kathleen Henderson Staudt
