Poetry as Spiritual Exercise: On A. R. Ammons Available to Purchase

In early 1942 the French Algerian writer Max-Pol Fouchet devoted a special double number of his review, Fontaine, to an unusual theme: De la poésie comme exercice spirituel.¹ His readers would certainly have recalled Ignatius Loyola's Exercitia spiritualia (1522–1524), a detailed set of meditations designed to lead Catholics on retreat to discern the will of God in their lives and thereby to attend to him first and foremost.² Holding a copy of the review in their hands, potential readers in Algiers or Paris might well have wondered how poetry could in any way resemble the meditations and prayers that Ignatius had composed and the effects that they could have on them. In some respects, Ignatius bypasses the tradition of contemplatio and consolidates meditatio, in part by absorbing the medieval tradition of consideratio: His pages are profoundly and densely committed to images of the life of Christ...