Anthology of Catholic Poets

by Joyce Kilmer

An anthology of Catholic poetry with works by Maurice Baring, Thomas Merton, Hilaire Belloc, Aubrey Beardsley, G. K. Chesterton, Padraic Colum, Oscar Wilde, Thomas Walsh, Alice Meynell, Joyce Kilmer, Michael Williams and others - over 128 poets with over 300 poems. "This is not a collection of devotional poems. What I have tried to do is bring together the poems in English that I like best that were written by Catholics since the middle of the Nineteenth Century. There are in this book poems religious in theme; there are also love-songs and war-songs. But I think that it may be called a book of Catholic poems. For a Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays; he is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life. And when a Catholic attempts to reflect in his words some of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious, he cannot be far from prayer and adoration." Alfred Joyce Kilmer (1886-1918), he never used the first name, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 1886. He was educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, and had a brief career as a teacher before moving into journalism. He worked on the staff of The Standard Dictionary from 1909 to 1912, and then became a special writer on the New York Times Sunday Magazine.

Genres: Poetry

420 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

About the author

People best know " Trees " (1913), work of American poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, whom World War I killed.

Works of this prolific journalist, literary critic, lecturer, and editor celebrated the common beauty of the natural world as well as his religious faith; people remember him most for this short poem, published in the collection Trees and Other Poems in 1914.
Despite his mostly unknown works, anthologies publish frequently a select few of his popular poems. Several contemporary critics of Kilmer and modern scholars disparaged his too simple, overly sentimental work and suggested his far too traditional, even archaic style.

Critics often compared Kilmer, considered the leading Catholic poet and lecturer of his generation in America to British contemporaries Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) and Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953). Army of the United States deployed him to Europe at the time during the First World War as a sergeant in the 165th United States infantry regiment; the second battle of the Marne in 1918 killed Kilmer at 31 years of age.

Reviews

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not having a deep exposure to poetry, I won't say too much here. Some were good, some were mediocre, some were great. I will say that it could have been alternatively titled "Anthology of 19th and 20th Century Irish Poets".