Before the Door of God

Before the Door of God traces the development of devotional English-language poetry from its origins in ancient hymnody to its current twenty-first-century incarnations. The poems in this volume demonstrate not only that devotional poetry—poetry that speaks to the divine—remains in vigorous practice, but also that the tradition reaches back to the very origins of poetry in English. There is a sense in these pages that the tradition of lyric poetry that developed was nearly inevitable, given the inherent concerns of the genre.