The Mystic and the Poet: Identity Formation, Deformation, and Reformation in Elizabeth Jennings' "Teresa of Avila" and Kathleen Jamie's "Julian of Norwich"

The mystic is a multiply significant figure that appears throughout the arc of textual history. A presence in most major systems of belief, the mystic is often designated as one who dares to seek unity with the Divine, the Other, the Truth; whose revelations are so thickly swathed by the fabric of esotericism that the uninitiated must squint to make out their form. Mystics are at once honored and marginalized, and their visions tend to walk the line of doctrine and blasphemy. The poet is a multiply significant figure that appears throughout the arc of textual history. The poet is often designated as one who dares to seek mastery over language, to manipulate it, to make it new. Poets are at once honored and marginalized in society, their work alternately challenging and upholding the status quo. To express an intangible experience through an inadequate language-this is the quest of both the poet and the mystic. Poetry and mysticism are branches of the same tree, and naturally, they have grown together, running parallel, crisscrossing and entwining their leaves. They remain connected, even in an age that has proclaimed the deaths of both God and the Author. While mystical writings may be viewed purely as products of their time, as testaments to belief, they are actually texts very open to postmodern readings. Framed in this light, mysticism is a border subject, existing both within and without religious tradition. It does not function in any sensible reality, goes beyond logic and proof. As Evelyn Underhill writes in Mysticism: A Study in Nature and Development of Spiritual Consciousness: Of all those forms of life and thought with which humanity has fed its craving for truth, mysticism alone postulates, and in the persons of its great initiates proves, not only the existence of the Absolute, but also this link: this possibility first of knowing, finally of attaining it.... The mystics find the basis of their method not in logic but in life: in the existence of a discoverable "real" a spark of true being, within the seeking subject, which can, in that ineffable experience which they call the "act of union" fuse itself with and thus apprehend the reality of the sought Object. (23-24) With the promise of knowledge free from the bounds of rationality, mysticism constitutes a grey area; it is a point of rupture, a deconstructed space in which contradictions can exist side by side. The mystic and the poet both function within this rupture, this place of open-ended interpretation. They are analogous figures, and the mystic can therefore appear in poetry as the poet's avatar. It is intriguing, though, how different such appropriations can be, and how flexible the readings. Though Elizabeth Jennings and Kathleen Jamie are two poets not often mentioned in the same breath, together they serve as a particularly striking example of the way postmodernism has changed the way the figure of the mystic can be deployed. Born 36 years apart, Jamie published her first book of poetry (Black Spiders, 1982) just as Jennings was putting the punctuation on her career. Their writing is vastly different in tone, with Jennings and her English, Roman Catholic, "Movement" (1) sensibilities looking very different from Jamie and her focus on feminine subjectivity, "Scottishness," and travel. Both women, however, use the figure of the female Christian mystic in their poetry to espouse ideas that are beyond the contemporary norm: Jennings, using it to hold onto tradition when irrationality and innovation were the driving force behind the arts; and Jamie, questioning through it the accepted ideas of femininity and nationalism. Yet Jennings ultimately takes a positive approach to mysticism in her poem "Teresa of Avila," using the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic Teresa of Avila to reaffirm the place of God in an increasingly secular society and to put forth an image of mysticism that embraces simplicity and unity. …