Abram C. Van Engen

Review: Word Made Fresh

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Cover image for "Word Made Fresh" by Abram Van Engen

Word Made Fresh, Abram Van Engen, foreword by Shane McCrae. Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing (ISBN: 9780802883605) 2024.

Summary: An invitation to delight in poetry while discovering how form and language help make meaning that may enrich our lives.

A recent survey found only twelve percent of Americans had read poetry in the past year. I wonder if many are like friends of my who are put off by one or both of two things. Firstly, they find poetry confusing or obscure. Secondly, they don’t know where to start. By contrast, Abram Van Engen believes poetry is for all of us, an invitation to pay attention, to delight, and reflect. For Christians, he goes further. Poetry may be found in much of scripture, most notably in the Psalms. They both disclose God to us and give us language to disclose ourselves to God at all the turns of life. Van Engen believes poetry is for you and he sets out in this book to show how you may enjoy it and find your life enriched by it.

He keeps it uncomplicated. He invites us to just pick up a book of poetry and begin reading until something catches us. Don’t worry about meaning to start with, just notice what caught our attention, and why, in our lives, that might be. Initially, he invites us to read for pleasure, and at the beginning of the book, shares a number of poems. If we like them, he invites us to pay more attention, and if not, to move on.

For example, in one chapter, he considers poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins (sonnet), William Carlos Williams (three four line verses), Gwendolyn Brooks, Denise Levertov (free verse), Lucille Clifton, Luci Shaw, Scott Cairns, Mary Karr, Richard Wilbur, James Weldon Johnson, John Donne (sonnet), Countee Cullen (also sonnet), and Robert Hadyn. By doing so, Van Engen offers us his own curated anthology, offering us the change to discover what we like, while offering very introductory comments.

While he discourages starting by asking what a poem means, he does encourage us to ask questions of the poems that catch our attention, For example, “Why was I struck by this poem?” What about this poem made us stop? “What gave us pause or pleasure? Was it the sound of the poem? Was it a certain memory the poem invoked or revived?” He then takes us through a very short poem (“This Is Just to Say”) by William Carlos Williams, considered previously and notices how each stanza is a literal room, adding to what has come before about eating plums another has set aside in the icebox. He asks questions about the structure, the line breaks, and the repeated “so.”

Before going further into technical matters, he invites us to think of poetry like a friendship. Like a friendship, poems travel with us through life. Along they way, they show us different things as we change and grow. Then Van Engen turns to form. He considers different forms and how form, rhyme schemes, and content interact. Another practice he encourages is erasing. For example, we erase all but the verbs. Or we isolate the requests in a prayer.

Then Van Engen explores how poets use words to name, the oblique ways they express truth. And he devotes two chapters on how poetry helps us rejoice with the rejoicing, and weep with the weeping. Poetry offers us language to express how glorious our life in the world can be, and how wretched. Finally, returning to Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” he shows how poems enact life. Van Engen contends that as “the just man justices” so poems poem as we read and experience them.

In recent years, I’ve been on a journey of discovery poetry. Van Engen makes this so approachable, so enjoyable. He introduces us to forms and uses of words and more. Mostly, he invites us to read a lot of poetry, guiding us lightly, asking us questions to help us discover for ourselves the wonder of poetry. And for Christians, he tips us off to a rich vein of devotional material many of us may have neglected. He show us how poetry and the poetry of scripture may enhance and enlarge one another. Read this book if you are in the place of feeling both drawn and daunted by the call of poetry. Read this book with a group, using the group guide provided. I believe you will find that which pleases and enriches you and your friends for the journey.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: City on a Hill

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City on a Hill

City on a Hill: A History of American Exceptionalism, Abram C. Van Engen. New Haven: Yale University Press, Forthcoming, February 25, 2020.

Summary: A history of Governor John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, and how the phrase “city on a hill” from the sermon became the metaphor for American exceptionalism.

On April 8, 1630, the Arbella stood off Massachusetts Bay, part of a fleet of Puritan-filled ships organized as the Massachusetts Bay Colony, with John Winthrop elected as their first governor. Governor Winthrop preached a sermon titled “A Model of Christian Charity” that called upon the company to embrace the virtue of charity in the community they would found, a mutual care for each other. He concluded with this peroration describing the consequence of such charity:

We shall find that the God of Israel is among us, when ten of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies; when He shall make us a praise and glory that men shall say of succeeding plantations, “may the Lord make it like that of New England.” For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken, and so cause Him to withdraw His present help from us, we shall be made a story and a by-word through the world.

As significant as the sermon would later become, it appears it was more or less forgotten in the concerns of settlement. It’s survival in handwritten manuscript form is a story in itself. In fact, it was forgotten for two hundred years, and only came into political parlance in the 1960’s when the “city on the hill” portion was first quoted by John F. Kennedy. In succeeding years it would turn up in the speeches of nearly every American president. Until President Trump.

Abram C. Van Engen traces the fascinating story of this sermon from its beginnings to the present in his new work, City on a Hill. He considers its initial import as a call to loving community among the Puritans. He follows the history of the manuscript, how it existed in obscurity among papers from the colony’s early years. He profiles archivists like Jeremy Belknap at Harvard and Ebenezer Hazard in New York, who passionately, tirelessly, and often at personal cost collected and contributed these materials at some of the earliest examples of the preservation of historical materials in Harvard and at the New York Historical Society. It was in New York that the sermon was stored, but not noticed for many years.

Van Engen considers the decision to center this historical archival work around the Puritans, rather than earlier arrivals to North America–the Pilgrims, the Dutch in New York, the Jamestown settlers, the French, the Spanish, and the Native peoples. The account was a New England account, a religious account focused on God’s providence. It shaped first the New England consciousness, and then a wider American consciousness, even while the sermon, apart from brief notice in the 1830’s continued to be ignored. He explores why it remained obscure as a lengthy sermon as opposed to a concise statement like the Mayflower Compact.

He then introduces the scholars that brought this Puritan heritage to national notice from Weber to Perry Miller to his successor Sacvan Bercovitch. An striking part of this account are his chapters on Perry Miller, who was concerned about the materialism that arose from Puritan values, and held up “A Model of Christian Charity” as the epitome of the spiritual values that even atheist Miller wanted to see embraced, incorporating it into anthologies used in teaching American history. I hope some day Van Engen follows up with a full-length study of Miller, a brilliant and tragic figure.

Miller’s work was the likely source of Kennedy’s use. Van Engen then follows its usage through successive presidents, culminating in Ronald Reagen who more than anyone appropriated the image for the country’s exceptionalist destiny, no where more movingly than his Farewell Address on January 11, 1989:

The past few days when I’ve been at that window upstairs, I’ve thought a bit of the shining “city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important, because he was an early Pilgrim – an early “Freedom Man.” He journeyed here on what today we’d call a little wooden boat, and, like the other pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind swept, God blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace – a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.

As Van Engen concludes this book, he notes President Trump’s lack of use of this language and contends that it represents a significant shift from rhetoric focused around American ideals to American interests. He argues that our current president focuses not on what makes us exceptional but on what we have in common with all nations–that we put our interests first. The vision of exceptionalism is one of being first. Van Engen wonders whether this shift in rhetoric is a longer term shift or one confined to this administration, acknowledging the flaws in each approach.

This is an important work in so many ways, from tracing the sermon’s origins and after history, to the ways the sermon has been misappropriated, ignoring the body of Winthrop’s appeal, to exploring the ways a focus on Puritan origins has blinded us to other aspects of the American story–the Native peoples, African slaves, settlement in other parts of the country, and the ways the religious focus of the message has been transformed into a founding document of America’s civil religion.

Within this narrative, Van Engen also highlights both the significant contribution and blind spots of archivists and curators in American historiography. Van Engen shows how our histories are shaped by what is collected. In the process, Van Engen also faces us with crucial questions of the substance of the rhetoric we use to describe our sense of national purpose and character at a time where we may be witnessing a sea change in that sense.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via Netgalley. The opinions I have expressed are my own.