Meditative poetry combines the religious practice of meditation

Meditation

Meditation is any form of a family of practices in which practitioners train their minds or self-induce a mode of consciousness to realize some benefit....

 with verse

Verse (poetry)

A verse is formally a single line in a metrical composition, e.g. poetry. However, the word has come to represent any division or grouping of words in such a composition, which traditionally had been referred to as a stanza....

. It occurs in many cultures, especially in Asian, European and Hindu cultures. Especially Buddhist and Hindu

Hindu

Hindu refers to an identity associated with the philosophical, religious and cultural systems that are indigenous to the Indian subcontinent. As used in the Constitution of India, the word "Hindu" is also attributed to all persons professing any Indian religion...

 writers have developed extensive theories and phase models for meditation (Bevis 1988;73-88).

In Christianity

Christianity

Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...

, meditation became a major devotional

Catholic devotions

A Roman Catholic devotion is a gift of oneself, or one's activities to God. It is a willingness and desire to dedicate oneself to serve God; either in terms of prayers or in terms of a set of pious acts such as the adoration of God or the veneration of the saints or the Virgin Mary.Roman Catholic...

 practice during the Middle Ages

Middle Ages

The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...

, closely associated with the life in monasteries. Definitions vary, but there were various attempts to distinguish meditation from contemplation

Contemplation

The word contemplation comes from the Latin word contemplatio. Its root is also that of the Latin word templum, a piece of ground consecrated for the taking of auspices, or a building for worship, derived either from Proto-Indo-European base *tem- "to cut", and so a "place reserved or cut out" or...

. While meditation focuses the mind on a text, preferably from the Bible

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

, 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

Protestant Reformation

The Protestant Reformation was a 16th-century split within Western Christianity initiated by Martin Luther, John Calvin and other early Protestants. The efforts of the self-described "reformers", who objected to the doctrines, rituals and ecclesiastical structure of the Roman Catholic Church, led...

 and Counter-Reformation

Counter-Reformation

The Counter-Reformation was the period of Catholic revival beginning with the Council of Trent and ending at the close of the Thirty Years' War, 1648 as a response to the Protestant Reformation.The Counter-Reformation was a comprehensive effort, composed of four major elements:#Ecclesiastical or...

, Jesuits like Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius of Loyola was a Spanish knight from a Basque noble family, hermit, priest since 1537, and theologian, who founded the Society of Jesus and was its first Superior General. Ignatius emerged as a religious leader during the Counter-Reformation...

 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

Analysis

Analysis is the process of breaking a complex topic or substance into smaller parts to gain a better understanding of it. The technique has been applied in the study of mathematics and logic since before Aristotle , though analysis as a formal concept is a relatively recent development.The word is...

); 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

Puritan

The Puritans were a significant grouping of English Protestants in the 16th and 17th centuries. Puritanism in this sense was founded by some Marian exiles from the clergy shortly after the accession of Elizabeth I of England in 1558, as an activist movement within the Church of England...

 meditation emphasized self-examination, applying Bible verses to contemporary, everyday life. In 1628, Thomas Taylor

Thomas Taylor (clergyman)

Thomas Taylor was an English clergyman.-Life:He was born in 1576 at Richmond, Yorkshire, where his father,was known as a friend to puritans and silenced ministers in the north. He distinguished himself at Cambridge, became fellow and reader in Hebrew at Christ's College, proceeded B.D. 1628, and...

 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

New England

New England is a region in the northeastern corner of the United States consisting of the six states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut...

, Thomas Hooker

Thomas Hooker

Thomas Hooker was a prominent Puritan colonial leader, who founded the Colony of Connecticut after dissenting with Puritan leaders in Massachusetts...

 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

Richard Baxter

Richard Baxter was an English Puritan church leader, poet, hymn-writer, theologian, and controversialist. Dean Stanley called him "the chief of English Protestant Schoolmen". After some false starts, he made his reputation by his ministry at Kidderminster, and at around the same time began a long...

'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

Edward Taylor

Edward Taylor was a colonial American poet, pastor and physician.-Early life:...

 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

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Dudley Bradstreet was New England's first published poet. Her work met with a positive reception in both the Old World and the New World.-Biography:...

 provided the first published meditations purely based ion the senses, celebrating nature's beauties as the creation of God. Using the analogy

Analogy

Analogy is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject to another particular subject , and a linguistic expression corresponding to such a process...

 of Nature as God's second book, poetic meditations gradually secularized, replacing the early allegoric technique with a more symbol

Symbol

A symbol is something which represents an idea, a physical entity or a process but is distinct from it. The purpose of a symbol is to communicate meaning. For example, a red octagon may be a symbol for "STOP". On a map, a picture of a tent might represent a campsite. Numerals are symbols for...

ic reading of nature and affirming the self-reliant individual (Pearce 1961, 42-57).

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century...

'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 simply relying on their imagination

Imagination

Imagination, also called the faculty of imagining, is the ability of forming mental images, sensations and concepts, in a moment when they are not perceived through sight, hearing or other senses...

. Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

 and Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

 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 (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

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 and Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens

Wallace Stevens was an American Modernist poet. He was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, educated at Harvard and then New York Law School, and spent most of his life working as a lawyer for the Hartford insurance company in Connecticut.His best-known poems include "Anecdote of the Jar",...

 began to fragmentarize the process, blending thoughts and sense perceptions in a sort of spiritual diary (Parini 1993,12). Postmodernist poets like John Ashbery

John Ashbery

John Lawrence Ashbery is an American poet. He has published more than twenty volumes of poetry and won nearly every major American award for poetry, including a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his collection Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. But Ashbery's work still proves controversial...

 deconstruct the contemplative aspect, the reference

Reference

Reference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...

 of the poem to an object outside itself, dissolving narrative

Narrative

A narrative is a constructive format that describes a sequence of non-fictional or fictional events. The word derives from the Latin verb narrare, "to recount", and is related to the adjective gnarus, "knowing" or "skilled"...

 or episodic

Episodic

Episodic can refer to* The nature of television series that are divided into short programs. See Episode* Episodic memory relates to the types of memory that result from specific incidents in a lifetime...

 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: U of Pittsburgh P, 1988.
• Daly, Robert. God's Altar. The World and the Flesh in Puritan Poetry. Berkeley, Loa Angeles, London: U of California P, 1978.
• Martz, Louis. The Poetry of Meditation. A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. 1954. Rev. New Haven: Yale UP, 1962.
• Larson, Laura Louise. "The tradition of meditative poetry in America" (January 1, 1994). ETD Collection for University of Connecticut. Paper AAI9525676. http://digitalcommons.uconn.edu/dissertations/AAI9525676
• Parini, Jay ed., Columbia History of American Poetry. New York: Columbia UP, 1993.
• Pearce, Roy Harvey. The Continuity of American Poetry. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.