“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer,” Simone Weil wrote in her exquisite reckoning with attention and grace. Because poetry is the art of attention, anchored in a total receptivity that judges nothing and rejects nothing, every poem is a kind of prayer, kneeling before the wild wonder of the world with faith and love.

The great Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva (October 8, 1892–August 31, 1941) articulates this dialogue between the poetic and the divine in Art in the Light of Conscience (public library) — the wonderful essay collection that gave us Tsvetaeva on the paradoxical psychology of our resistance to ideas.

Living in a political atmosphere that banished the divine from human life — the same state-mandated atheism I too grew up with in communist Bulgaria — Tsvetaeva writes with an eye to the prayerful poems of her beloved Rilke:

What can we say about God? Nothing. What can we say to God? Everything. Poems to God are prayer. And if there are no prayers nowadays (except Rilke’s… I know of none), it is not because we don’t have anything to say to God, nor because we have no one to say this anything to — there is something and there is someone — but because we haven’t the conscience to praise and pray God in the same language we’ve used for centuries to praise and pray absolutely everything. In our age, to have the courage for direct speech to God (for prayer) we must either not know what poems are, or forget.

A century later, in the atmosphere of Western consumer capitalism with its cult of the self, it is even more countercultural to speak about the soul — perhaps the last human holdout against commodification, too private and furtive to be turned into a marketable data point. And yet if art is what we make to save ourselves, to cotton the shock of living, then the soul is the only studio we have.

Tsvetaeva, who considered art a physical manifestation of the spiritual and a spiritual manifestation of the physical, knew this and articulated it beautifully:

Poetry — which I never take my eyes off when I say “art,” the whole event of poetry, from the poet’s visitation to the reader’s reception — takes place entirely within the soul.

Complement with Wendell Berry on how to be a poet and a complete human being, Lucille Clifton on how to be a living poem, and this soulful read on how poetry saves lives, then revisit Richard Jefferies on nature as a prayer for presence.