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  • 标题:Who speaks for winter? Jessica Powers: poet and mystic.
  • 作者:Warner, Mary
  • 期刊名称:Renascence: Essays on Values in Literature
  • 印刷版ISSN:0034-4346
  • 出版年度:2002
  • 期号:June
  • 语种:English
  • 出版社:Marquette University Press
  • 摘要:THESE lines from "The Trackless Solitude" by Jessica Powers introduce readers to several critical images unique to the American landscape: "acres of virgin lands, of sacred wood" "this trackless solitude," and "bramble and brush." Repeatedly in her poetry, Powers speaks of "acres," an apt description of the geography of America's rich and extensive farmlands, which she knew intimately from her rural Wisconsin roots. It is also a paradoxical image of the inner geography of the soul seeking God, which marked Powers's many years of contemplative religious life. The acres of virgin lands provide a metaphor unknown to earlier Christian mystics--John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, whose mystical journey captivated Powers.
  • 关键词:American poetry;Christian poetry;Mysticism;Nature

Who speaks for winter? Jessica Powers: poet and mystic.


Warner, Mary


WHO SPEAKS FOR WINTER?
JESSICA POWERS: POET AND MYSTIC

 Deep in the soul the acres lie
 of virgin lands, of sacred wood
 where waits the Spirit. Each soul bears
 this trackless solitude ...

 ... The Spirit lights the way for her;
 bramble and brush are pushed apart.
 He lures her into wilderness
 but to rejoice her heart ... (Selected Poetry of
 Jessica Powers 6)


THESE lines from "The Trackless Solitude" by Jessica Powers introduce readers to several critical images unique to the American landscape: "acres of virgin lands, of sacred wood" "this trackless solitude," and "bramble and brush." Repeatedly in her poetry, Powers speaks of "acres," an apt description of the geography of America's rich and extensive farmlands, which she knew intimately from her rural Wisconsin roots. It is also a paradoxical image of the inner geography of the soul seeking God, which marked Powers's many years of contemplative religious life. The acres of virgin lands provide a metaphor unknown to earlier Christian mystics--John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, whose mystical journey captivated Powers.

This is the first of the distinct contributions of Powers's mysticism; her experiences with American landscape taught of expansiveness, fertile soil, relentless cold and wind, and spring times alive with greenness and "glistening foliage." Unlike many European mystics, specifically John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila, who often rejected the natural and secular worlds as barriers to achieving ultimate union with God, thus emphasizing salvation over creation, Powers moved through and in nature to spiritual union. This essay explores how Jessica Powers, a poet who has not received the attention and study she deserves, continues the tradition of celebration of nature that many of America's eighteenth and nineteenth century writers began. Powers, however, brings contemporary readers a sense of mysticism and of the place of contemplative religious life, a particular gift to religion and literature in America. Powers's rendering of the paradoxical imagery of inner and outer geography is precisely why she has a voice, a voice which needs to be heard by contemporary readers situated in a world so advanced scientifically and technologically yet facing voids that can only be satisfied in the realm of the spiritual.

At a Spring 2000 conference of the American Religion and Literature Society, a European scholar questioned my assertion that Jessica Powers, through the use of the American landscape, offers a distinct quality of mysticism. He argued, and rightly so, that European mystics such as John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila surely used images from nature; thus, Powers was not the initiator of this motif. My response and one of the claims of this essay is that the American landscape, and specifically the Wisconsin of rich glacial soil and topography composed of plains, stream-cut plateaus and large areas of erosion-worn bluffs, (1) was unlike any geography known to European mystics. The expansiveness of the United States and its relative wilderness remaining uncharted in the waning decades of the nineteenth century provided a unique mystical world for a woman with the vision to fathom that world and with the sense of a poet to convey what she saw.

Further, Powers had a distinct sense of winter, the kinds of winters known firsthand from life in the upper Midwest. Dolores Leckey, Powers's biographer, argues that "winter in all its forms, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, as well as meteorological, runs through her writing. She learned to live sparely, esthetically, deliberately, daringly, deeply in Wisconsin. It was winter that vibrated through her being like music" (3). Powers captures this metaphor of winter, this harsh, cold season demanding strength of will and firm belief in the return of spring, as a unique metaphor for the spiritual life. Lines from her poem "Wisconsin Winter" demonstrate the metaphor:
 Climate, declared a holy man, can be
 a purification;
 climate, atonement for the sins of all.
 Taken with love, or even resignation,
 it can make potent pleading for God's grace.
 Snowflake and snowdrift, ice and icicle,
 frost on the wall, frost on the windowpane,
 frost when my breath edges a scarf with lace:
 These are the coins of silver we collect
 for others and ourselves. It may well be
 that this year will yield fortunes we can pour
 into the treasury ... (Selected Poetry 164)


The speaker in this poem makes concrete the theological concept of sin and atonement in linking these with the winter that Powers knew in all its dimensions. The role of the contemplative is to be in such total union with the Divine that the human person becomes illuminator and intercessor of Divine love. Living in the harshness of winter with love or even resignation, the speaker asserts, are a "potent pleading for God's grace;" such metaphors most clearly define Powers's ability to integrate the spirituality of her Carmelite predecessors with the natural landscape and philosophical and spiritual climate she knew best in rural Wisconsin.

Viewed in this way, Jessica Powers emerges as a voice of a new world mystic, as Regina Siegfried defines the mysticism seen in the United States. Powers repeatedly uses the landscape of America, with its vastness and variety as metaphor for the relationship of humans to the Divine. This portrayal of the physical world as conduit to the metaphysical is one of the new world mystics' primary characteristics. Siegfried includes Powers along with others such as Annie Dillard, Emerson, the Quakers and the Shakers as being "rooted in the ordinary with a consistent, conscientious seeing of the sacred" (Siegfried, audiocassette "New World Mystics"). Herein lies another of the distinctive gifts of Powers to American Literature. Jessica Powers lived first as a child of a farming family; eventually she became a Carmelite nun, living a cloistered life for over forty-seven years in the Carmel established first in Milwaukee, and later in Pewaukee, Wisconsin. Her life in the convent, seemingly hidden from the World, was ordinary; her blending of the mysticism of the natural world based in the distinctive Wisconsin landscape with the mysticism of Catholic and Carmelite spirituality yielded poetry. This poetry voices the feminine, the agrarian, the woman religious, and the "new world" of twentieth-century United States.

Jessica Powers was born in 1905 to parents of Scots-Irish heritage who settled in southwestern Wisconsin in the Cat Tail Valley. She lived until 1988, her life spanning the turbulent twentieth century. Her childhood was marked by suffering: her seventeen-year-old sister Dorothy died of tuberculosis when Powers was eleven, both of Powers's parents were dead before Powers was twenty. Even though by her early twenties she knew she wanted to pursue a literary career, Powers was destined to be a farm housekeeper until 1937, when her brothers had married and assumed management of the family farms. Much of the poetry of this period of Powers's life is nature poetry; much was unrefined. However, suffering and loss worked for Powers as they did for Emily Dickinson, a poet Powers emulated, providing her with poignant images and fertile material for poetry. Powers, a child during World War I and an adolescent during the Great Depression, saw images of poverty and expressed these images in several poems. In "The Master Beggar," a poem about the homeless poor in the streets of New York and Chicago, she portrays Jesus of Nazareth, "Worse than the poorest mendicant alive" (Selected Poetry 23). She sees in the Wisconsin landscape described in "The Ledge of Light," that "God is a thousand acres ... of high sweet-smelling April and the flow / of windy light across a wide plateau" (Selected Poetry 22). In her years as a Carmelite nun, she repeatedly experienced and wrote of "the greenness and calmness and coolness of the woods of God's mercy" (Selected Poetry 3). Her embodiment of Carmelite spirituality is intertwined with the life and reality of the American continent and its growth throughout the twentieth century.

Several poems from this early period of Powers's writing were published in Wisconsin newspapers and magazines. Two poems, "Petenwell Rock" and "The Old Bridge," provide representative examples of Powers's early period of imagery solidly based in her natural surroundings. At the Petenwell reservoir, a twenty-five mile drive from Powers's home, "a huge rock guarded the dance hall like some pre-historic monolith" (Leckey 56). In "Petenwell Rock," the speaker is not unlike Powers, who on her first visit lingered outside the dance hall, absorbing the energy of the stars and dance rhythms alike (56). The speaker is attending a country-dance; leaving the dance, she muses:
 [...] out of a long black road there bloomed this bright
 portion of revel, near
 a tall pine-wreathed rock, as certain as a wall.
 [...] where dancers swayed like songs, and music bellowed
 its anger against grief, and laughter flying
 fell on my ears like sounded waterfall.
 But overhead the whip-poor-wills were crying,
 crowding all loneliness into one cry,
 and a great rock maintained a wise old silence
 lifting its strength into the starlight sky.
 [.........]
 [...] O silver loneliness!
 O golden laughter!
 O grief that only loneliness should last!
 Madness will die, and youth will hurry after;
 into some shadowed past,
 dancers bow like dust; laughter will crumble,
 while beneath the silver of the moon
 for loveliness and joy that died too soon
 these plaintive birds will cry
 and this tall rock will watch with calm indifference,
 holding itself aloof against the sky. (Selected Poetry 103)


The mood is riot unlike that expressed in the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson or Robert Frost; the American landscape is evident in both. Powers, though, possessed a growing spirituality that would move beyond the physical world's indifference. Her inner restlessness would be sated only by that which would endure longer than the great rock that maintained its silence.

"The Old Bridge," a second poem highlighting the landscape of Powers's home, opens with the speaker recalling childhood fears of the "ogre waiting under it [the bridge]" (Selected Poetry 104) and ends with the acknowledgement that the childish fears are fled in the wisdom of experience, yet "I find / that worse than ogres are the dark shapes crouched / lurking beneath the bridges of my mind" (Selected Poetry 104). The speaker's anxieties are dissipated when she grows "bold enough to peer and pry, seeking the monster, finding peace instead" (Selected Poetry 104). Even in this early work Powers articulates powerful human experiences like those when we must confront the dark shapes within.

"The Granite Woman," written in 1929, exemplifies the ways the natural world blended seamlessly for Powers into the metaphysical. This brief lyric portrays a woman whose mind "bore earth's agony so long," and who is no stranger to the rough demands of physical toil. The poem's final stanza exclaims, "her heart that shut its doors on love's wide calling / that was as granite where the storms begin, / would break beneath the weight of petals falling / out of the music of this violin" (Selected Poetry 62). Here the inner life of the future contemplative is evident in the "heart that shut its doors on love's wide calling;" the solitary heart, though, even in its granite steeled against suffering, when permeated by the love of the Beloved and the tempering of suffering, can break under the weight of petals falling. The granite woman provides an apt metaphor for the American woman of the late 1920s and of the onset of the Great Depression, the woman who so often needed to serve in stoic perseverance.

Knowing intuitively that she needed kindred spirits for her poetic growth, Powers moved to New York for its rich cultural ambience. Despite her inexperience with urban life and amid the dire poverty of the Depression years, she found New York City in the thirties a rich supportive environment, particularly for Catholic writers. For most of these New York years, she lived with philosopher Anton Pegis and his wife, Jessica. Ultimately, her exploration of the inner life and the influence of the Carmelite spirituality of John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila led Powers to the Carmelite Order. Since Carmelite monasteries in Brooklyn and the Bronx were full, twenty-one being the maximum number according to the rule of Teresa of Avila (Leckey 105), Powers at first experienced disappointment. A new monastery opened in Milwaukee, however, allowing Powers to return to her beloved Wisconsin.

The role of the contemplative, one who exists for God and as supplicant for the community, was not part of life in the United States until the last decade of the eighteenth century. The growing nation was much more focused on growth, expansion and the inevitable pragmatism that marks emerging nations. The first American Carmel, as individual Carmelite monasteries are called, began in Maryland in 1790 (Kappes 11). Even then the demands of Catholic immigrants for schools caused the nuns, for a time, to assume apostolic ministry--teaching in girls' schools. The true vocation of the contemplative, however, built from Benedict's "ora et labora," calls for a life devoted to the rhythm of manual labor and prayer, a life in the world but not of the world. Eventually, the Carmelites were able to return to the observance of a cloistered, contemplative life when Sisters of Charity, followers of Mother Seton, and members of other religious orders assumed the mission of Catholic education. As Carmelite convents spread across the growing nation, a foundation was established in Bettendorf, Iowa, in 1911. When the Bettendorf Carmel reached capacity, a new foundation was established in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; this was the convent Jessica Powers entered in 1941. Powers moved to a place where her physical world would be limited; in contemplative life, however, her poetic insights grew in the new depths of her spiritual landscape. Powers, coming from the "world of work," found in contemplative life the home she had been seeking during the years on the family farm in Mauston, Wisconsin, and during her years in Chicago and New York.

During the years of her urban experience she wrote a number of significant poems; these blended the images she witnessed in the streets and in a nation on the verge of entering World War II with her developing spirituality grounded in the Carmelite experience. In Powers's poem, "Human Winter," the speaker struggles with the insufferable coldness with which humans treat one another: "So chilled am I by this presence of human winter / I cannot move or speak" (Selected Poetry 113). The poem is rich in winter imagery--the "wind of inclement glances," "their frost too subtle to forestall," and "words fall in slow icy rain and freeze / upon the heart's sudden dismantled tree" (Selected Poetry 113). The winters in nature were part of the fabric of Powers's experience; her inner eye translated these natural winters to express coldness on the metaphysical level. "Human Winter," composed in 1939 or 1940 before Powers entered Carmel, maintains an immediacy of imagery enlivened through the contemplation of nature, of the external world.

A vital contribution of and a rationale for rediscovering Jessica Powers is precisely the richness of her interior life. "The dominating force in the life and poetry of Jessica Powers is the doctrine of Divine Indwelling, the life of the Blessed Trinity within her soul" (Geigel unpublished thesis). Powers's name in the Carmelite Order, Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, was significant on many levels, not the least of which was the emphasis that arises in many of her strongest poems of inscape, the word formulated by Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet Powers emulated. He used inscape to express the "individually distinctive form, which constitutes the rich and revealing `oneness' of the natural object" (Gardner xx). Hopkins expresses this notion poetically in "God's Grandeur," a poem which observes: "There lives the dearest freshness deep down things" (Gerard Manley Hopkins Poems and Prose 27). Powers grounds her poetry and sense of inscape in the Catholic monastic world as the titles of several of her poems evidence: "The House at Rest," "The Place of Splendor," or "Doxology." In each poem the motif recurs: "God fills my being to the brim / with floods of His immensity. I drown within a drop of Him / whose sea-bed is infinity" (Selected Poetry 191).

Particularly during her years as a Carmelite nun, Powers lived within a rather limited external geography; her primary environment was interior. The interior world, a rich one for the mystic poet, engendered Powers's strongest images. A frequent one is the thousand acres of God as compared to the small or limited acre of human beings. Bishop Robert M0rneau, who has co-edited the Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers and written extensively on Powers's poetry, suggests that readers can apply the words of Richard Sewall in a description of Emily Dickinson to Jessica Powers:
 There is a paradox here, of course. She [Emily Dickinson] knew very
 well that the landscape of the spirit--the inner life--needed a
 tongue, and no one surpassed her in getting at its truth. She is
 simply saying, "There's no need to tell you I love you; while I
 breathe, I do." It is when she says, "I tell you what I see," that
 she describes her purpose as a poet of both lives, inner and outer.
 As the poet of the inner life, her dedication to this kind of truth
 led her to insights of the most penetrating kind, epiphanies of the
 moral and spiritual life; as poet of the external world, she caught
 its evanescences and its permanent realities with matchless
 precision. (Sewall 611) (2)


Powers also knew very well that the "landscape of the spirit--the inner life--needed a tongue" (611). In a letter of 1970, Powers wrote, "We waste time (well, not really waste) in doing all the dull mundane duties, and beautiful thoughts are laid aside, thoughts that could change lives and lift up the world."3 She weaves, then, the strands of her life into poetry that articulates the inner landscape of a mystic and embodies the transcendent for contemporary readers. Always her imagery depicts America: the expansiveness of the continent, the agrarian world, the innate longing for freedom, and the seekers continually exploring new frontiers. A recurring image of tracklessness, indicated in the poem, "This Trackless Solitude," referred to above, appears frequently in Powers's poetry. In addition to this metaphor of unchartability, apt to both the American landscape and the inner spirit of humans, there is the anguish of the soul in search, which Powers explored in "Night of Storm":
 The times are winter. Thus a poet signed
 ourfrosty fate. Life is a night of snow.
 We see no path before us, nor behind;
 Our faithless footprints from our own heels blow.
 Where can an exile out of heaven go,
 with murk and terror in a trackless place
 and stinging bees swept down upon his face?

 Or what is else? There is your world within.
 and now the soul is supplicant: O most
 wretched and blind, come home! Where love has been
 bums the great lantern of the Holy Ghost.
 Here is His light; review your world of frost:
 a drifting miracle! What had been night
 reels with eucharists of light. (Selected Poetry 36)


The poem exemplifies the range of Powers's imagery that simultaneously blends the natural and the metaphysical worlds. The "trackless place" (36) and "stinging bees" (36) are concrete realities of the physical world and address the challenges of the journey; the "great lantern of the Holy Ghost," (36) the calling homeward, and the night that "reels with eucharists of light" (36) express profoundly the metaphysical world that rarely can be communicated except through symbolic, poetic language. Note the winter metaphors as well: "life is a night of snow / We see no path before us, nor behind; / Our faithless footprints from our own heels blow" (36).

In "Come, South Wind" written nearly thirteen years after Powers became a Carmelite nun, she moves through mystical experience, in her inner landscape, of the presence of the Holy Spirit, as she signals in an epigraph to the poem, quoting John of the Cross: "By south wind is meant the Holy Spirit who awakens love" (Selected Poetry 37). Thus the poem's speaker begins "Come, South Wind" with an entreaty:
 Over and over I say to the south wind: come,
 waken in me and warm me!
 I have walked too long with a death's chill in the air,
 mourned over trees too long with branches bare. (Selected
 Poetry 37)


In all the American landscape--physical, sociological, psychological, metaphorical--rooted so deeply in Powers's life, she was led by the Spirit of God ever to seek the inner world of "God space." In a century so marked by war as the twentieth has been, Powers offered the paradoxical response of the contemplative. It was 1941 when she entered a Carmelite monastery; in that same year, Thomas Merton became a Trappist monk, and Dorothy Day set herself up in an unpopular role as a prophetic witness endorsing pacifism and renouncing U.S. mobilization plans for war (Kappes 61). Powers's poem, "This Generation of War," from The House of Splendor published in 1946, gives both a poet's and future contemplative nun's response:
 Now is the moment most acceptable
 To enter the soul's peace, to rise and go
 Into the vast illuminated silence
 Of regions that the saints and mystics know.

 Let it be said of us: They found God dwelling
 Deep in their souls to which they fled from pain.
 Let it be written on the stones they grant us
 When peace shall deign to walk the earth again:

 These found the hidden places of the tempest
 In the soul's fastness, in its long sweet lull,
 A generation of the inward vision
 Whose outward glance became intolerable. (The Place of
 Splendor 34)


That vision of the outer world in the midst of World War II was indeed intolerable; Powers, Merton, and others entering contemplative life chose prayer as an answer to the rising tide of world aggression. They found the hidden places of the tempest in "the soul's fastness" (34). And as "they found God dwelling deep in their souls" (34), they became as Powers's speaker in "The Little Nation," "citizen[s] of love, that little nation with the blood-stained sod / where even the slain have power" (Selected Poetry 39); they were of "the only country / that sends forth an ambassador to God" (Selected Poetry 39).

A writer who does not explore the effects of time and the pace of life cannot reach Americans in the early years of the twenty-first century. The contemplative, however, stands in opposition to all that militates against the life of the spirit, knowing her own time and space as solely God's time and space Once more Jessica Powers emerges as one such poetic voice. The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers, a volume edited in the four years before Powers's death, includes a series of poems assembled under the motif, "The Human Journey: the Agony and the Ecstasy." This motif demonstrates simultaneously the complex blending of winter images on the metaphorical and spiritual level with the experiences of U.S. citizens moving from the Depression through World War II and the Cold War into the Post-Modern era. Several of these poems exemplify the trajectory of Powers's journey as poet. "The Master Beggar," written in 1937, climaxes with "I dream to grant You all and stand apart / with You on some bleak corner, tear frequented, / and trouble mankind for its human heart" (Selected Poetry 23). In "The Masses," a 1947 poem, the speaker asserts, "My love had not the openness to hold / so cumbersome a human multitude. / People in bulk would turn the dials of my heart to cold ..." (Selected Poetry 90). By the poem's end, the speaker, like Powers herself who had become a cloistered nun, realizes "with Him I bear them / in separate tenderness one by one" (Selected Poetry 90).

Powers revised many of her poems; two notable ones are "The Garments of God" and "There is a Homelessness," written first in the 30s and 40s. Each revision articulates more lucidly the reality of the human struggle through uncertainty and loss of meaning. "Everything Rushes, Rushes," written in her latter years of contemplative life, demonstrates her keen sense of the American landscape and the American soul:
 The brisk blue morning whisked in with a thought:
 everything in creation rushes, rushes
 towards God--tall trees, small bushes,
 quick birds and fish, the beetles round as naught,

 ... and lesser things to which life cannot come:
 our work, our words that move toward the Unmoved,
 whatever can be touched, used, handled, loved
 all, all are rushing on ad terminum. (Selected Poetry 163)


Note the many landscapes identified in the poem: the natural, the sociological, the psychological, the spiritual. Jessica Powers knew on every level that humans rush on "ad terminum" unless the race is toward the "Unmoved." In poems like "Abraham" where Powers identifies with the patriarch, "Mine is a far and lonely journey, too," (Selected Poetry 66) she refuses to trivialize the journey. In "Take Your Only Son," her speaker agonizes, "Not beside Abram does my story set me. / I built the altar, laid the wood for flame. / I stayed my sword as long as duty let me, / and then alas, alas, no angel came" (Selected Poetry 153). These poems indicate Powers's capacity to understand the landscape most difficult to travel, the landscape of suffering. Readers can find these assertions in poems like "The Garments of God," "There is a Homelessness" and "The Leftovers."

Powers's ultimate strength as a poet for twenty-first century readers, however, rests in her potential to set forth in relatively brief lyrics the meaning found in the deep interior landscape where God abides. "The Place of Splendor" and "The House at Rest" urge readers to explore this interior world. "The Vision" moves with the human traveler through chaotic worlds, but climaxes with the reassurance the mystic always embraces: "The flame burned on, innocent, unimperiled. / There was no darkness that could put it out." Powers lived the pattern of Carmelite spirituality that understood the spiritual journey is movement from darkness into light. Her lyric poetry affirms the paradoxes of the journey typified in the final stanza of "Only One Voice":
 Only one voice,
 but morning lay awake in her bed and listened,
 and then was out and racing over the hills
 to hear and see.
 And water and light and air and the tall trees
 and people, young and old, began to hum
 the catchy, catchy tune.
 And everyone danced, and everyone, everything,
 even the last roots of the doddering oak
 believed in life. (Selected Poetry 148)


Notes

(1) Information from Wisconsin, A Guide to the Badger State (New York: Hastings House, 1976), cited in Winter Music: A Life of Jessica Powers by Dolores R. Leckey, page 9.

(2) Morneau's comparison of Dickinson and Powers comes from The Life of Emily Dickinson, Ed. Richard B. Sewall (New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), page 611.

(3) From a letter of Jessica Powers, Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit, to Sister Regina Siegfied. Written from the Pewaukee Carmel, February 14, 1970.

Works Cited

Geigel, Winifred F. "A Comparative Study of the Poetry of Jessica Powers and St. John of the Cross." Thesis. St. John University, 1961.

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poems and Prose. Ed. W. H. Gardner. New York: Penguin Books, 1953.

Kappes, Marcianne. The Track of the Mystic: the Spirituality of Jessica Powers. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1994.

Leckey, Dolores R. Winter Music: A Life of Jessica Power. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1992.

Momeau, Robert F. "The Spirituality of Jessica Powers." Spiritual Life (Fall 1990):150-160.

Powers, Jessica (Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit). Letter to Sister Regina Siegfried. 14 Feb. 1970. Jessica Powers Papers. Marquette U Archives, Milwaukee.

--. The Selected Poetry of Jessica Powers. Eds. Regina Siegfried and Robert Morneau. Kansas City, MO: Sheed & Ward, 1989.

Sewall, Richard B. The Life of Emily Dickinson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974.

Siegfried, Regina. "New World Mystics: The Wisdom of Jessica Powers and Others." Audiocassette. Liguori, MO: Redemptorist Pastoral Communications, 1993.

--. "The Paradox of Light and Dark." Studia Mystica, 7 (Spring 1984): 28-45.

Mary Warner is an Associate Professor of English and the Director of English Education at Western Carolina University, where she has taught since 1996. Her other publications include "The Paradox of Contemplation: the Poetry of Jessica Powers" in Christianity and Literature as well as publications in Contemporary Southern Writers and Markings. Dr. Warner is currently working on a biographical, bibliographical, critical essay on Jessica Powers for A Companion to Catholic Literature.
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