I have spent recent weeks in the company of Charles Wesley. I happened upon his obelisk in Marylebone High Street, and then realised, week after week, that as many as a third of the hymns we sing at St John’s Church, Buxton, were written by him. He composed over 6,000 hymns – some say 6,500 – which is almost as many hymns as Emily Dickinson wrote poems. His hymns (like some of her poems) are deeply rooted in scripture, generally follow a narrative, and can be ordered into a kind of Christian Year. Wesley was something of a hymn cannibal, working with other people’s lines and tunes, and his own work was itself cannibalised and transformed. John Wesley, introducing the hymns of both brothers, authorised their use by any Christian church so long as the words weren’t altered. But they were and are.

Some poems become hymns, notable poems like ‘My soul, there is a country’ by Vaughan. But the idea of the hymn as a poem is more problematic – a poem which aspires to leave its author behind, which has a collective voice and belongs to a communion. The idea attracts me: the hymn is recognised as an extension of liturgy and an intensification of scriptural lessons. It engages common feelings in a direct way. It can be a language of deep connection and harmony. Of course, all of these qualities have a downside: sentimentality, triumphalism, self-righteousness. They overwhelm the thought that scripture and liturgy induce (if they do) with something more immediate. Hymns and poems are different in kind, and it’s the music that does it. When ‘real’ poets write what they call a hymn, they do not generally compose a musical accompaniment: we read the words as an extension of patterned speech, even if they circle upward.

In 2012, in our News and Notes pages, we reprinted Mark Dow’s celebrated 1997 interview with A.R. Ammons. Glare had recently been published, and Ammons gave a public reading at New York University. It was four years before his death. The interview was originally published in Pequod 43 (2000).

Dow reminded Ammons that the Baptist hymns he heard and sang as a boy had left a mark. ‘Yes.’ ‘And that when you did attend church in North Carolina, you attended a Pentecostal church.’ ‘Yes.’ Then he ventured to ask, ‘What is your take on the phenomena of possession by the Holy Spirit and of speaking in tongues, on the experience itself as distinct from the dogma attached to it?’

Ammons’s answer to this bold question is marked by a rare sincerity. He acknowledges what he has seen, what he has felt and continues to feel, and draws his experience – a little wryly perhaps, the closest he gets to irony – towards a scientific explanation. He is not credulous, but he has no ready explanation for what he has – truly – witnessed.

I’ve never myself felt possessed and never spoke in tongues. But I’ve witnessed it. Sometimes people would get up and address the audience in the church in a language that could not be understood. All the gestures of sense, the nodding of the head and so forth, were there, as if they were making sense... Well, I think all those things are also translatable into scientific or psychological language, you know, catatonia and all kinds of possessions like that are possible, and it’s just that in the church, and especially in a Pentecostal church, the intensity of hell and heaven becomes so great that people lose the sense of themselves, I think, and just become concentrated in this possession. But I don’t understand it, I mean I just witnessed it – […] I took it to be perfectly normal. Because that’s the way others did, that’s the way my parents and others did, that this is the presence of the Lord among us.

When I say the hymns were a kind of center to me, or a home, that’s still true emotionally. But you know, I’m an absolute agnostic. I don’t believe any of that – stuff. But I still feel the feelings, if that makes any difference.

Calling the residual power of the hymns a ‘center to me, or a home’ which remains emotionally true, despite his loss of belief in ‘that – stuff’ is an experience many will recognise. Mark Dow won’t let Ammons off the hook: ‘And so what does that mean, to feel those feelings –’

I don’t know. I don’t know. I play the piano a little bit. I play Mozart, mostly. But occasionally I play hymns. And I feel that immediately as being the real me. That’s where I come from, that’s who I am. […] And also, by the way, the content of much of my poetry is not different from the content in those hymns. There’s a hymn that begins, ‘Oh they tell me of a land far beyond the sky / Oh they tell me of a home far away’¹ – that’s all over my poetry, that kind of transcendence, sense of a distant home, a spiritual home. But there’s no astronomical reasons for this [laughing]. They haven’t found any of those places, Hubbel hasn’t photographed any of those places. But you know, if much of our religious sentiment comes from, what I believe, the hierarchy that we’ve already established in our secular relations – as in corporations or universities, where you have figures of authority – and they take on a kind of symbolic value, become over-determined with energy of all the people they represent, and so there’s a kind of glow, or awe, about them. Well, if you extend that up, above the periphery of the earth itself into the sky, then you have the same father sitting at the top of this hierarchy, but now he’s no longer corporeal because he’s above us. So I think, as primates, we’re always looking for or recognizing that our order and meaning depend largely on the structure of this hierarchy. And at the top is a glowing figure that is the king exponentially risen to the highest realm. What do you think of that?

‘Beautiful’, says Mark Dow. ‘Isn’t that something, if that’s true? That could justify all this religious feeling in the absence of any evidence to support it, of a religious kind.’ Dow is reminded of ‘the structure in your poems, of the spirals rising –’ and Ammons concurs. ‘Absolutely. And to the top, where everything is represented by nothing, because it’s all been assimilated into a radiance, it’s just energy, at the highest level.’ What is remarkable here is Ammons’s candour, his readiness to speculate and entertain a possibility without consenting to believe it. It is the hymn tradition – especially from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries – which has helped to construct our geography of the angel-inflected heavens and our sense of political and angelic structures.

Donald Davie, in The New Oxford Book of Christian Verse, acknowledges that many poets (he mentions Yeats, Hardy and Larkin but Ammons could be in his list) would seem to have some claim to inclusion in the book. But his task as the commissioned anthologist is to represent the specifically Christian, to guard the gate against pretenders, sentimentalists, fraudsters, ‘what-if-ers’:

For Christianity is a religion with a doctrine, a body of dogma. And so it may seem that we can approach a first definition of Christian poetry: it will be a poetry that appeals, either explicitly or by plain implication (and in whatever spirit – rebelliously for instance, or sardonically, as often with Emily Dickinson) to some one or more of the distinctive doctrines of the Christian church: to the Incarnation pre-eminently, to Redemption, Judgement, the Holy Trinity, the Fall.

There is something sternly orthodox about Davie’s insistence on the meaning and the demands of the Christian vision in poetry. The tug of a familiar hymn some of us hear now, and remember the churches where we first sang it, the congregation, the shared space and shared sound into which many of us piped our shrill wish to believe and to conform, those key changes that stretched our voices and wrung feeling out of us, is not sufficient now. ‘Beautiful’ doesn’t cut the mustard. Many returning worshippers who have surprised a hunger in themselves slip into an empty church to attend to the contained silence and safety of the place, and maybe the silence slowly fills; others chance to come along when a choir is in good voice, find they know the words of a hymn (‘Lo! He Comes with Clouds Descending’, ‘Love Divine, All Loves Excelling’, ‘O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing’) by heart though they had forgotten they knew, and their lips move naturally, relaxing into song. It is a re-beginning. For Ammons what remains true is the formative effect of those early experiences on his own ‘spiral rising’, ‘radiance’, ‘energy, at the highest level’. Communion may not be far away.

¹‘O they tell me of a home far beyond the skies’, J.K. Atwood (1885)