Poetic Existence
Reflections on the Life of a Priest
Originally submitted for EDU-622: Humane Letters at Hillsdale College.
The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream V.i.12-17.[1]
It is poetry, precisely,
With its behavior of a bird thrashing against the transparency
Of a windowpane that testifies to the fact
That we don’t know how to live in phantasmagoria.[2]
Czeslaw Milosz
Doug Floyd lives between heaven and earth. I believe it is because he has come close to death. He lives with a borrowed kidney; the only way to live dependent on someone else’s body is with deep bitterness or gratitude. COVID sent him to the hospital. When he was finally discharged, he couldn’t walk, and his kidney transplant failed, leaving him on dialysis three times a week for months. The house in which he and his wife lived for 26 years burned down. “The Lord gives everything and charges by taking it back. What a bargain,”[3] writes Jack Gilbert, one of the poets to whom Doug introduced me. This is Doug’s mode of being. After the fire, he wrote, “When the house is burning and it’s obvious, it’s gone, all I can think about is how good it was, it was a treasure and I’m grateful for it.”[4]
Sometimes, during a conversation about something relatively mundane, I’ll see water pooling in the corner of his eyes. I haven’t asked, but I like to think that he is in love with the world. He has been given much, and much has been taken from him. He described a recliner which they had given away before the fire, and which the recipient had offered back: “And so I thought this is a biblical pattern, the things we give away are the only things that survive.”[5]
Søren Kierkegaard describes a “poet-existence” which is sin: “the sin of poetizing instead of being, of relating to the good and the true through the imagination instead of being that––that is, existentially striving to be that.”[6] The poet sins by his unwillingness to let go of his agony or to believe that God would take away his agony. He perceives his hidden suffering as the source of his poetic genius, and even as he loves God, he loves his agony and would not ask God to remove it.
The poet-existence may be a development from Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage (since he refers to the poet-existence as a kind of resignation, and resignation is at least an ethical category).[7] The aesthetic individual lives one step removed from himself. He hears that “All the world is a stage,” and lives his life as though casting roles for himself, always one step removed from the circumstances in which he inserts himself. He avoids commitment, as commitment is not very theatrical and requires getting too involved in other people’s lives. The poet-existence, engaging with goodness and truth only imaginatively, operates under similar conditions. It loves these things from a distance, but shrinks from any substantial relationship with true reality.
I believe that Doug has attained a higher poetic existence. Kierkegaard describes a knight of faith who makes a double-movement of infinite resignation and faith.[8] He gives up whatever God has given him, and only in this way can he receive it back. Abraham is the example: he must give up Isaac before he can receive Isaac back again. You begin almost where you started, there need be no exterior change. We see Abraham and his son before they leave for Mount Moriah; we see them come back, and nothing seems to have changed. But to them, everything has changed. The poet-existence which Kierkegaard describes only practices resignation: he deems it pious to live one step removed from the world, poetizing his own existence, refusing to give his whole heart to anything but the task of poetizing.
But God is a jealous God, and demands everything. Nor is He gnostic. After His example, we give our bodies to others, and our hearts with them. Faith is not the pretension of pious resignation from the world; faith is the step back into the world, knowing that God could take it away any time. Faith does not involve fear or resentment. It is not afraid of the moment when God might take something away, and it does not resent God when He does so. Faith accepts what he gives, when he gives it, and lets go when it is taken away: “The Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.”[9]
Doug’s poet-existence holds him between heaven and earth, not at safe distance, but firmly planted in each. What the aesthetic poet describes and cannot do, Doug has done. He does not, like the Aristophanic Socrates, hover between heaven and earth, looking at both and living in neither. He exists in both at the same time.
Doug is a priest. I heard a sermon once on a passage I can’t remember, although it may have been Ephesians 2:6–– “And God hath raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus.”[10] The sermon explained that when believers gather together on Sunday morning, they are mystically transported to Heaven. Alexander Schmemann makes a similar case in the second chapter of his book, For the Life of the World:
The early Christians realized that in order to become the temple of the Holy Spirit they must ascend to heaven where Christ has ascended… For there––in heaven––they were immersed in the new life of the Kingdom; and when, after this “liturgy of ascension,” they returned into the world, their faces reflected the light, the “joy and peace” of that Kingdom and they were truly its witnesses.[11]
As a priest, Doug has mediated this transport for years. He returns to the world like a lesser Moses, a glimmer of heaven remaining in his eyes. To say, “He is so heavenly minded that he is of no earthly good,” cannot describe Doug; in fact, he seems to undermine the expression entirely. It is precisely his heavenly-mindedness that gives him such a positive relation to the world.
How does he live like this? The only answer I have is poetry. I don’t know whether it is that he sees the world poetically, or that I have come to understand him through the poems he taught me, which brings me to believe that poetry is door to his way of living. But there are many who have suggested that poetry’s function has something to do with drawing heaven and earth together. Theologian James Jordan makes the claim:
Symbolism is more important than anything else for the life of man… How can I write this so confidently? Simple. The doctrine of creation means that every created item, and also the created order as a whole, reflects the character of the God Who created it. In other words, everything in the creation, and the creation as a whole, points to God. In short, everything is a sign or symbol of God.[12]
The figural interpretations of medieval theologians explored the symbolic nature of the world. At its highest, metaphor performs the same function. A well-placed metaphor can take “The forms of things unknown” and give them a name by which we can understand them a little more clearly. God has seated us in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus. The poet sees heaven on earth, and frees his verse by describing the manifold ways in which the Kingdom of Heaven is now.
[1] William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Edited by Russ McDonald (NY: Penguin Books Inc., 1959), V.i.12-17.
[2] Czeslaw Milosz, “A Young Man” in Second Space: New Poems. Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Robert Hass (NY: Harper Collins, 2004), 47.
[3] Jack Gilbert, “The Lost Hotels of Paris” in Collected Poems (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012), 263.
[4] Rev. Doug Floyd, “Reflections After the Fire.” Saint Brendan’s Anglican Church: Sermons, August 29, 2022. Accessed March 24, 2025. https://stbrendanschurch.org/sermons/reflections-after-the-fire/.
[5] Rev. Doug Floyd, “Reflections After the Fire.”
[6] Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death. Edited and translated by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 77.
[7] The ethical stage involves a kind of resignation from the world, which appears pious, since it is willing to give up the world for some real or perceived higher good. One form of ethical resignation involves giving up worldly goods for a philosophical-ascetic life, such as stoicism might offer. It is easy for Christians to adopt a similar ethical resignation, in which, in the name of loving God, the individual gives up earthly goods. Lent is a season of such resignation, but it is only a season, which is followed by feasting. Permanent resignation from earthly goods seems to miss the role of feasting in Christian life.
The poet-existence practices a kind of resignation which resigns itself from the world for the sake of poetry. Consider, for example, a poet who falls in love with a girl. The proper end of such relationship would be marriage. The poet, however, despairs of marriage, fearing that marriage would destroy his poetic capability. It pains him that he “cannot” marry the woman he loves, but as long as he is in the throes of passion, his poetry is marvelous. He cannot imagine that married life would inspire the same kind of poetry. Therefore, he agonizes over his love for the woman, even as he himself refuses to believe that he could still be himself and be married, since his conception of himself is so deeply connected to his poetic life. He is unwilling to believe that God could give him anything besides this poet-existence: it is the frustrated desire to marry (even though he himself is the one who frustrates the desire), clashing with the belief that his poetry requires him to remain in this state, which paralyzes him from a proper relationship with this woman.
For more on the aesthetic and ethical, see Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Translated by Alastair Hannay (UK, Penguin Books, 1992).
[8] Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling/ Repetition. Translated by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
[9] Job 1:21 KJV.
[10] Ephesians 2:6 KJV.
[11] Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World (Yonkers, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2018), 37.
[12] James Jordan, “Symbolism, A Manifesto.” Biblical Horizons: Downloads. Accessed March 24, 2025. https://biblicalhorizons.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Symbolism-A-Manifesto.pdf.