Elizabeth Jennings and Poetry Reaching Out Towards Transcendence

The article discusses how Elizabeth Jennings, having distanced herself from “The Movement,” engages her work in a dialogue with philosophy and theology, especially with regard to metaphysics and transcendence. The main focus is on the analysis of her poetic idiom based on oxymoron and silence. Jennings’ poetry is informed on the one hand by her Catholic Christianity, reflected not only in the poems’ subject matter but primarily in a religious sense pervading all her poetry. On the other hand it is empowered by Jennings’ belief in the capacity of the imaginative use of words to enter into the metaphysical realm and embody the ineffable. Jennings links human words of poetry with the Word of the divine, and in consequence bestows a sacramental value upon poetry in which she sees a human transcription of the perennial Logos shaping and illuminating the world.