Author Marilynne Robinson writes about a new poetry anthology called, American Religious Poems, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba:

Whitman’s nation was no nation in terms of the time in which he wrote. It had then, as it has now, no bond of blood, soil, or tongue to create in it the organic unity the theorists of nineteenth-century nationalism considered essential components of a legitimate national culture. Whitman’s genius was to reject all that, to see a real America and to create a visionary America based squarely and exuberantly on ever-changing patterns of life and newer streams of population. Dickinson’s poetry quietly presses every question religious belief might seem, to the hostile or the anxious, to preclude. If these are the two greatest American poets, as Harold Bloom and I and legions of other critics and writers and readers believe, then the classic achievement of our literature is an openness, intellectual and spiritual, that is utterly unlike the phenomenon of an “American religion” promoted by certain politicians and religionists and derided by Professor Bloom and many others. If American religion is narrow and unlikable, it is difficult to account for a book like this one, in which so many fine poets are represented.

Though doubt, alienation, and even parody are elements in some of these poems, the collection is quite appropriately aware that these all have reference to the field of thought and meaning ordinarily called religious. Any reader of Ecclesiastes or the Book of Job is aware that the canon of scripture has room for thought that can disrupt conventional assumptions about the nature of belief, whether these assumptions are held by the religious or by their critics. Indeed, religion is by nature restless with itself, impatient within the constraints of its own expression.

Thanks to Critical Mass.