The Oxford Book of English Mystical Verse was a poetry anthology edited by Daniel Howard Sinclair Nicholson and Arthur Hugh Evelyn Lee, and published in 1917 by the Oxford University Press. The compilation contains much religious verse, mainly from English Christian traditions, and some from other religions. It also gives a representative cross-section of the esoteric interests of the first decade of the twentieth century, most notably in the presence of poems by A. E. Waite and the young Aleister Crowley. Lee, an Anglican clergyman, associated with Waite. Nicholson later published a work on mysticism and St. Francis of Assisi. They both joined the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, Lee in 1908, and Nicholson in 1910; both were friends of Charles Williams. Therefore the selection touches on the side of occultism thought compatible in its time with Christian belief.
The very varied scope of the collection shows through in poems from the latter part of the nineteenth century onwards. Its eclectic nature is shown by the presence of: Alfred Gurney, a clergyman most notable for his friendship with Dante Gabriel and Christina Rossetti; Edward Carpenter, Fabian socialist and homosexual; Frederick William Henry Myers, academic and psychic researcher; John Addington Symonds, aesthete; Walter Leslie Wilmshurst, writer on freemasonry and Wagner; Darrell Figgis, better known as a novelist and Sinn Féin member; George Santayana, the philosopher; Fred G. Bowles who was a Tin Pan Alley lyricist.
The entire collection is available online.
Read more about this topic: Oxford Religious Poetry Anthologies
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