Poetry as analogy and anathemata: Rhythm, sacrament, and secularity in Hopkins, Jones, and Przywara

The article shows how Przywara's view of analogy as rhythm or relation-in-difference is shared by Gerard Manley Hopkins and David Jones. Following discussion of the theological and historical claims of Jones's essay ‘Art and Sacrament’, and of Hopkins as a precursor of Przywara, Przywara's account of rhythm in Analogia Entis (1932) is compared to Jones's long poem The Anathemata (1952). The rhythm both works describe moves between being and subjectivity. It is argued that the rhythm's fulfilment is manifest in sacrament, to which poetry stands in analogical relationship (and difference). Because analogical rhythm incorporates subjective freedom, it can be comprehended as an underlying theological rhythm of secular modernity. The article concludes by clarifying the terms on which poetry, as a secular form, expresses the relation of philosophy and theology without being the same as either.