By Kimberly Johnson

This class will survey the development of a strong tradition of devotional poetry in the Anglophone tradition, and discover its application in and influence on Mormon literature. We will begin our conversation with a brief introduction to the genre’s earliest expressions in the hymns of ancient Greece and Rome and of the Bible, and its development in early Christian lyrics. We will discover how medieval Scholastics used poetry to augment affectively their intellectual engagements with Christianity, which together would govern the later expansion of lyric poetry in English, both secular and sacred. Shaped both by the generic fashions of continental literature and the upheavals in continental theology, the devotional lyric in English sees an unprecedented efflorescence during the Reformation and post-Reformation eras, and establishes this mode of poetic writing as central to the literary landscape. This seminal period codifies the conventions and expectations of the devotional lyric, and influences its development for the succeeding centuries up until the present day.