Flannery's Poets (and a Movie)

Part Two of Beyond the Bedside Summa: a Closer Look at Flannery O’Connor’s Bookshelf

Read Part One

“Where the poet and the realist are truly combined you have St. Catherine of Genoa.” (Letter to A., 8 Dec. 1955)

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Leonie Adams

R. P. T. Coffin

James Dickey
“I have a friend, James Dickey, a poet, who was down here recently to show his little boy the ponies.” (Letter to John Hawkes, 27 Jul. 1958)

Robert Fitzgerald

William Goodreau

John Edward Hardy

Gerard Manley Hopkins
“Bridges wrote Hopkins at one point and asked him how he could possibly learn to believe, expecting, I suppose, a metaphysical answer. Hopkins only said, ‘Give alms.’” (Letter to William Sessions, 8 Jul. 1956, and again in a letter to Alfred Corn, 30 May 1962)

Jacapone da Todi

St. John of the Cross

Carol Johnson
“Look in your last Commonweal and see a poem by a girl named Carol Johnson. She is the only writer I ever initiated a correspondence with... She had been a great reader of Rimbaud and announced she had followed Rimbaud as far as he went and had found herself, much against her will, at the Church. She therefore entered, with I presume, love and a profound distaste.” (Letter to A., 18 Nov. 1956)

John Logan

John Frederick Nims

Ned O’Gorman

Charles Peguy
“This is not an age of great Catholic theology. We are living on our capital and it is past time for a new synthesis. What St. Thomas did for the new learning of the 13th century we are in bad need of someone to do for the 20th. Crisis means something different of course for the Catholic than the Protestant. For them it is the dissolution of their churches; for us it is losing the world. We have produced artists that might be thought of as crisis artists, for instance Bernanos and Peguy.” (Letter to A., 22 Nov. 1958)

Sr. Bernetta Quinn

Raymond Roseliep

Allen Tate
“If you intend to throw Allen Tate out as a poet, you are going to have to get you some better aesthetic grounds than that there is no color in his poems or none of the things that have color. This will not do. This is a confusion of one thing with another and a sentimental, or close to it, approach to poetry.” (Letter to A., 30 Nov. 1957)

Francis Thompson

Movie: Three Faces of Eve
“I persuaded my mother this week that she didn’t want to go see The Ten Commandments. Told her she ought to read the book first anyway and presented her with Exodus. Then to salve my guilty conscience I went to see the Three Faces of Eve with her as she didn’t like to go by herself. First time I had been to the picter show in two or three years. It was not such a bad picture, but I ain’t going for another three years if I can possibly help it.” (Letter to A., 19 Oct. 1957)

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Mobile, Alabama, 2017 - Photograph by Lydwine