Poetry And Prophecy

This 1952 book is an inquiry into the relations in origin between literature and inspiration, based on a study of the practices of seers in modern communities where oral literature sill survives, and of the records of primitive poetry in the West and North. Mrs Chadwick discusses the universal reverence accorded to poets, musicians, seers, or prophets, the training they underwent, the methods of ecstasy, and the remarkable similarities of their messages in remote and different parts of the world.

In this volume, a list of esteemed scholars engage with the literary readings of prophetic and poetic texts in the Hebrew Bible that revolve around sensitivity to the complexity of language, the fragility of meaning, and the interplay of texts. These themes are discussed using a variety of hermeneutical strategies. In Part 1, Poets and Poetry, some essays address the nature of poetic language itself, while others play with themes of love, beauty, and nature in specific poetic texts. The essays in Part 2, Prophets and Prophecy, consider prophets and prophecy from a number of interpretive directions, moving from internal literary analysis to the reception of these texts and their imagery in a range of ancient and modern contexts. Those in Part 3, on the other hand, Texts in Play, take more recent works (from Shakespeare to Tove Jansson's Moomin books for children) as their point of departure, developing conversations between texts across the centuries that enrich the readings of both the ancient and modern pieces of literature.

The book discusses the image of the prophet and the role of prophecy in Modern Hebrew Poetry. The first part of the book presents the prophetic archetypal biographies of prophets, heroes and artists in Hebrew and European mythologies. It also examines the historical facts which lead to the departure of the prophet from Hebrew literature following the destruction of the second temple. Finally, it addresses the necessity of reappearance of the prophet in the 18th and 19th centuries in Hebrew thought and literature and provides a short history of that reappearance in Haskala literature. The second part focuses upon three major “prophets poets”: Haim N. Bialik, Avraham Shlonski and Uri Z. Greenberg. The book may be of interest to scholars of Literature, Judaism, Philosophy, Science of Religion, Anthropology, Folklore and Rhetoric.

The books of the Latter Prophets have traditionally been treated as persuasive speeches, and interpreted according to their rhetoric. At the same time, interpreters recognize the poetic form of much prophecy. This study takes up the notion of the 'prophet' as 'poet', focusing on word-play in Hosea and on the lyrical plot of that book; the case is made for treating Hosea as a stark, full-length poem of inexhaustible power.

Addresses the relationship between the language of ritual and poetic language