Smash hit

As he said in his Raymond Williams lecture last year, “The non-secular is, foundationally, a willingness to see things or persons as the objects of another sensibility than our own.” And that is one definition of what poetry, and indeed all art, aspires to do.

So poetry has a religious dimension in spite of itself? “Yes, I know some people might say that sounds like religious imperialism. But I find it means quite the opposite — that poetry which may appear to be marginal or indifferent or even hostile to what I believe as a Christian still has to be taken seriously because there is something about it which reflects the fact of faith in language.”

Words and their ramifications fascinate him. We get sidetracked as he explains his philosopher friend the late Gillian Rose’s comparison of language and love, in that they both require people to stake themselves and take risk.

Then, having signalled “broad-brush statement coming up”, he proceeds: “An interesting thing about Christianity is that, from the beginning, it has had an investment not just in words but in translation.” Judaism, Islam, Buddhism and Hinduism rely on specific languages for their sacred texts, while Christianity began “in a multi-lingual culture where translation (was) of the essence” . (He mentions Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek and Latin.)

He admits this is something that can make Christianity “maddening to people in other religious traditions, particularly Muslims. The Koran in Arabic is a clear absolute standard, it is God communicating. Set against the bittiness of Christian scripture, that’s an interesting contrast. The Christian would say the bittiness of Christian scripture reflects the mysteriousness of how God acts in human life.”

Another pet theory is the nobility of struggle in language. He does not mind “the kind of postmodernism that talks of jouissance and play” but prefers evidence of “failing and evolving and continuing. A text that shows signs of struggle is one whose relation to reality may be more clear than an apparently lucid or smooth text.”

So poetry is the art form for the 21st century? “And for the 22nd and 23rd. So long as we’re language-using animals, then to speak in such a way that the struggle with reality shows through, that’s the way to speak truthfully. Poetry is one way of doing that.”

I recall that both T. S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas admired the Metaphysical poets, who lived in an age of dramatic change similar to our own. “Spot-on,” replies the Archbishop. “When I discovered the Metaphysicals aged about 17, I had a sense of — ‘Where have you been all my life?’ ”

And what did they mean to you? “With Donne and Herbert, for example, I felt I was watching language performing with exuberance — an exuberance which serves deep feeling but always in search of truthfulness.”

Today the Archbishop’s favourite poets include W. H. Auden (for his “mixture of technical mastery and music”), T. S. Eliot (“The Quartets I go back to constantly, but also Marina”) and Geoffrey Hill (“a regular companion, particularly his Lachrimae sonnets”). He also has “a soft spot for Browning and his d ramatic monologues” and for Hardy with “his extraordinary gifts in evoking a world and a landscape”. In Welsh he opts for Waldo Williams, whom he has translated, “Gwenallt” and Saunders Lewis, who he feels is underrated as a poet.

Continuing the list-making, I can’t resist asking his favourite Christmas poem. He mentions medieval lyrics such as He came al so stille before plumping for Milton’s ode On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, “because it’s a magnificent Baroque piece about a very un-Baroque reality. Yes, give it a bit of trumpet music for Christmas morning. It goes with the beginning of the Christmas Oratorio for me.”

Andrew Lycett’s Dylan Thomas: a New Life is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £20