Dreams and images

Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing through the destructive pall of World War I, there took place a tremendous revival of the Catholic literary movement. An integral part of that revival was the enormous output of poetry. These poems are not all “Catholic” poems in the sense of “religious” poems; there are also poems of love and of family, of war and of peace, of home and of exile. Yet each is properly a Catholic poem, as Joyce Kilmer explains: “For a Catholic is not a Catholic only when he prays; he is a Catholic in all the thoughts and actions of his life. And when a Catholic attempts to reflect in words some of the Beauty of which as a poet he is conscious, he cannot be far from prayer and adoration.”