In a wide-ranging conversation for the “Faith and Imagination” podcast, Dr Hurley speaks with the Director of the Humanities Center at BYU about his recent book, “Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief”. Dr Hurley addresses the question of what poets (and readers) believe poetry can say or do that other kinds of language or expression can not, and how poetry might itself operate as a unique mode of believing. After taking soundings from the first stirrings of Western literature and philosophy, with Homer and Plato, and with reference also to Dante, Dr Hurley focuses on the long nineteenth century, as a time when the form and authority of both poetic and religious practice were being fiercely reimagined.
