The Millions

Absence of Inspiration, Absence of God: On Christian Wiman’s ‘He Held Radical Light’

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One of the themes that speak most powerfully from Christian Wiman’s writings—poems, essays, memoirs—is that of the absence of inspiration or the absence of God. To begin with the first formulation, Wiman concedes of the texts most close to his heart that for page after page after page they will fail to inspire. For one of the most prominent Christian poets working in North America today, it might seem surprising to see how he calls the Bible, for the most part, “cold ash.” It is also in these pages—his first volume of essays, Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet (2007)—that Wiman relates his time reading Milton in Guatemala in similar terms: reading for hours on end while getting nothing in return. The poet has to be patient, as his art doesn’t care for him in the same way he cares for her.

The absence of God, the second form that this absence takes in Wiman’s writings, is a motif he takes from and, for the present volume, from the Spanish poet . The absence of God in the contemporary world is, to Wiman, the cue for Christian faith to seize on. What presented him decisively with this cue was when, a year after he married the poet , he was diagnosed with a life-threatening form of cancer. Coming from a deeply religious family and culture, in the years following his diagnosis Wiman began to

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