Imagination Wide Awake
Imagination Wide Awake
An Interview with Malcolm Guite by Abbey Sitterley
On the Imagination as Divine Instrument
It begins with a simple knock on glass. With each rap, doily curtains shimmy as a vest-clad scholar bids the viewer come in and be welcome. Most videos on Malcolm Guite’s Youtube channel start this way. Launched as a means to stay in touch and share with fans and friends during the height of the pandemic, Guite’s videos span a variety of topics: from 19th century poetry, to sonnets written for the church liturgical year or the everyday, and the occasional sprinkle of an Arthurian legend—or ten. A simple browse of Guite’s channel will likely endear viewers, not only to his general demeanor, but also to his sharp knowledge of literature, theology, and the poetic dance that lies between both. Malcolm brims with passion for the active work of God in the arts, and he can’t help but extend the invitation.
My first exposure to Malcolm’s work was one of his recorded lectures on my favorite Inkling, Charles Williams. It didn’t take much more for me to fall down the rabbit hole. His lectures inspired me and his poems delighted me. His joy at the written word fed my joy too. But the current running through his work was what truly enchanted me: an invitation. Guite offered a vision of the God of the universe lovingly active in our imagination, rendering each creative act touched by eternity.
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Of course, Guite’s ideas had to start somewhere. “I was very fortunate to be born into a family where there was lots of poetry and music and so on,” Guite recalls as he re-lit his pipe of Kendal Black Cherry tobacco. Our conversation over Zoom began with the origins of his love for literature, greatly inspired by Guite’s well-read parents who sewed poems and quotes from the greats into the tapestry of everyday life.
“I was born in Africa and we used to go back to England each year by sea and, you know, we’d be on the stern of the ship,” he explains. “Just for that one lovely moment when you’re free of the land, you would see the furrow of the wake of the boat. My mother would be standing beside me and she’d put her arm around me and say, ‘The white foam flew / And the furrow followed free / We were the first to ever burst into the silent sea.’ And I went ‘oo! That’s Coleridge.’ And so there was poetry and song.”
The natural inclusion of good words at a young age only continued as Guite encountered teachers and students who shared his love for literature, “modeling how poetry might be the delight of childhood, but it didn’t have to be childish. It could grow with you.” And it did.
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Guite borrows a term from C. S. Lewis to describe his early childhood admiration for the Chronicles of Narnia: baptized imagination. This phrase came up many times in my conversation with Guite. One might say Guite’s work is an unfurling of this concept, tracing the mechanics and implications of an imagination raised in the likeness of Christ’s resurrection. But as is true in the Christian life is, in this sense, true of the imagination: baptism is only the beginning.
Guite says that he really encountered Lewis three times: first as the fantasy writer, then as the literary critic (to Lewis’ Preface to Paradise Lost he is no stranger), and third as a theologian. Appreciation for the rest of the Inkling crew accompanied. Then a new-old friend resurfaced in his academic work: Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
“Everybody has to know Coleridge as a critic. He’s a founding literary critic on Shakespeare. We were always given quotations about the imagination from Biographia Literaria and I think most people thought ‘I’ve got the quotes, what do I need the book for?’ But being a curious sort of fellow, I decided to get the book… and it was an astonishing book. I mean, it’s a real confessio fidei. It's actually Coleridge’s own account of his return to faith, as well as an account of how he wrote the lyrical ballads with Wordsworth. It’s got all kinds of juicy literary stories in it.”
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During his final years as an undergraduate, Guite himself came to saving faith. But an encounter with chapter 13 of the Biographia Literaria sparked his lifelong query into the heart of imagination. “We’d all been told about ‘the living power and prime Agent of all human Perception,’ but they’d stop the quotation there,” Guite recalled in our talk. “And when I went back, of course it says, ‘The primary IMAGINATION that I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM.’ And that fundamental underpinning of everything was just not quoted to us.”
The implications of Coleridge’s full statement astonished Guite.
“He’s explaining the reason why you have a creative imagination, [an imagination] which not only helps you write poetry, but actually is at work every time you see a human face, or a tree, or a star. It’s bringing the world together from all these bits of data and shaping something beautiful. And the reason why you can do that, and the reason why your shaping is valid, is because you are participating in God’s living act of creation, an eternal act of creation. It didn’t happen back there and back then. It’s constantly happening.”
As he moved on through university, Guite declared that Coleridge was a good companion to have on a journey into poetry and theology, “a mind he understood and met with, and his met with mine.” Guite would go on to devote an entire chapter to Coleridge in his book Faith, Hope, and Poetry, which is a call to see the imagination as a “truth-bearing faculty.” In 2017, he released a biography of the literary great through Hodder & Stoughton entitled, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His commission was serendipitously timed: the Biographia Literaria celebrated its 200th anniversary that year.
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A true man of the written word, Guite is also an accomplished poet of highly-acclaimed collections. His most recent, David’s Crown, is comprised of poetic responses to all one hundred and fifty Psalms.
When I ask him what draws his pen to primarily write sonnets, he replies, “I think there is a paradoxical but generative and beautiful relationship between form and freedom. I think it's a mistake in free verse to think that you can do more rather than less. In fact, it's precisely the constraints that work.”
Formerly a chaplain at Girton College, Guite makes many of his sonnets available for liturgical use in churches, should they wish to incorporate them in conversation with the Scriptures. It’s one way he takes joy in being among the company of other artists who have found unity between their love for Christ and affection for the written word.
“I love the idea of the poet as the bard,” Guite shares. “The poet is the person who reframes and retells, and makes it a kind of joyous, communal ritual out of the shaping stories of the tribe. And I used to think, ‘I wish I lived in Homer’s time and I could do that thing, or I could be like an Irish bard. But then I thought, Well, wait a minute. I belong to a tribe of story keepers. That's what Christianity is, and who's writing that stuff now?”
As our conversation progressed, I whispered a small prayer of thanks for Malcolm’s witness. Eight years ago, I was wooed by the ‘Power of a Great Affection’ through the work of artists who pointed to the truth in simple obedience to their calling. Guite’s ideas offer steady, biblical answers for aspects of my faith journey I often wonder about, such as the dimensions of artistic power and its role in the salvific work of Christ. If it’s God’s kindness that leads us to repentance (Romans 2:4), perhaps it’s His baptism of our imagination that guides our steps from strength to strength (Psalm 84).
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Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God is Guite’s most recent apologetic along these lines. Built upon the Laing Lectures he gave at Regent College in 2019, the book centers its thesis on three forms of the Christian imagination: the artistic, the moral, and the prophetic.
The artistic imagination, he explains, is the means by which we seek to name the ineffable. This can be attempted by harnessing metaphor, simile, and analogy which can “offer us some apprehensions that begin just where comprehension has found its limit.” Poetic language can help us sketch the dimensions of mystery that lie beyond the limits of philosophical axioms and theological suppositions.
As for the moral, Guite points to the power of art to “image and re-imagine the world.” In the creative act, we can test the dynamics of our empathy and put on the perspective of the other. This vision seeks to learn, to be weighed, to be measured, and to submit to the possibility that we may be found wanting.
Lastly, the argument for a prophetic imagination is centered on William Blake’s poem “Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, which casts a motivating vision of what could be or is to come. “Blake’s poem, and all prophetic art, is intended to arouse us and stir us to action,” Guite explains in his book, “How do we awake from the deadly sleep? How do we throw off the folds of the heavy black cloth? How do we lift the veil?”
Artists may already feel these veins within their own work intuitively. As Christians, we long to sketch out our spiritual longings: to define things that are, to inquire of things that could be, and to herald things that will be. Such a calling is both a high responsibility and a gift of the Spirit.
“Once you have Christ at the center,” Guite explained, “then some of these things that are so good actually have a proper place. They have a new ministry.”
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To these ends, Guite shared this advice for aspiring artists: pay deep attention to things and “discern the sacred.” Referring to Wendell Berry’s great poem “How To Be A Poet” (“There are no unsacred places; / there are only sacred places / and desecrated places”), Guite added that we are “trying to discern the holy wherever it is. If you’re in a desecrated place—and there are plenty of them—you will try to reconsecrate it. If you're a young artist, and you really believe that there are no unsacred places, only sacred places and desecrated places, then you will be lifting the veil wherever you go.”
“To make any art you have to pay attention,” Guite says. “You have to pay attention to the thing that's inspiring you. But in the end, of course, you have to pay attention to the art. You have to completely serve the object you're making. You have to make something true; which doesn't mean it can’t be a complete work of fiction, but it must be true to itself. It must have truth within its world. It must be true. It must have nothing false in it.” Though limitations, doubts, and sins assail us, the artist who has made Christ his center need not fear. We can create with holy fear into joy. The Lord is sovereign yet.
Theologian and faerie tale writer George MacDonald wrote, “either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.” When we obediently embrace the power of our imagination in artistic, moral, and prophetic forms, we help testify to God’s perfect heart of truth and loveliness. As co-creators made in His image, we are invited to join in the work of God who created all things through the power of His Word—and called it good.
At this possibility, the heart of a creative person leaps within them. Mine certainly does, at least. As a Christian artist whose eyes were opened to the beauty of Christ due to the faithfulness of other artists, I now belong to that tribe of storytellers. Maybe you do too.
The artistic sight God has given us is not only an intentional calling, but also heralds the Kingdom home. Through imagination, God has equipped us to cultivate His vision: a place we’ve never been, a people redeemed, Christ’s rule made manifest. It’s our duty—no, even better, our joy—to lift the veil.
Abbey Sitterley
Writer & Musician
Abbey is a columnist for the Finger Lake Times, Executive Assistant at Grace Road Church, and Storyteller for Renew the Arts.
Find Malcolm Guite’s Work Here