Faith in the Furnace of Doubt : Dana Gioia's Visionary Poetics

Dana Gioia’s characters and verses cry from the depths, their faith tried—and purified—in the furnace of doubt. Enchanted by Gioia’s visionary poetics, the reader discovers that deep faithfulness comes only by way of the via negativa: profundity is preceded by privation; suffering is the school of sure hope; a lover who cannot conquer evil’s great absence has never—has he?—ever really loved.

Gioia’s poetry is an ideal site for thoughtful exposition of spiritual searching undertaken in a contemporary idiom. Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia's Poetics of Belief draws on the wisdom of St. Augustine and Søren Kierkegaard, René Girard and Jacques Maritain (all of whom Gioia cites as influences) to make intelligible the mystical unveilings and complex movements of faith and doubt that mark Gioia’s poems—from his early verse "The Burning Ladder" to his magnum opus in-progress "The Underworld."

This first full-length, in-depth study of Gioia’s poetry grants extended interpretation of the meanings a Catholic vision makes manifest. Hren conducts a close reading of poems whose spiritual charges are better grasped when read by the lights of those theologians, philosophers, and poets who have—to paraphrase T.S. Eliot—raided the inarticulate: from Dante to St. Teresa of Avila, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Nietzsche, from Dionysius the Areopagite to Dostoevsky, from St. John of the Cross to St. John Henry Newman. Gioia’s litanies take all comers to the frayed edges of belief—a cliff that extends over the limits of language, the abyss of unknowing. Maybe at its highest, under the muse of divine madness, poetry can coax us across to the Word, the Lord of language, the "choreographer / of entrances and exits" who speaks all the worries and wonders we’ve left—for all those "midnight / whispers traveling the wires"—unsaid.