Disagreeing with Dr. Johnson

I admire Samuel Johnson. I really do. A man who can compile a Dictionary of the English Language in seven years with exacting precision is hardly to be argued with. But I am today.

Dr. Johnson wrote:

Contemplative piety, or the intercourse between God and the human soul, cannot be poetical. Man admitted to implore the mercy of his Creator, and plead the merits of his Redeemer, is already in a higher state than poetry can confer.

The essence of poetry is invention; such invention as, by producing something unexpected, surprises and delights. The topicks of devotion are few, and being few are universally known; but few as they are, they can be made no more; they can receive no grace from novelty of sentiment, and very little from novelty of expression. Of sentiments purely religious, it will be found that the most simple expression is the most sublime. Poetry loses its lustre and its power, because it is applied to the decoration of something more excellent than itself. All that verse can do is to help the memory, and delight the ear, and for these purposes it may be very useful; but it supplies nothing to the mind. The ideas of Christian Theology are too simple for fiction, and too majestick for ornament; to recommend them by tropes and figures, is to magnify by a concave mirror the sidereal hemisphere.

I don’t claim to have the analytical powers of Dr. Johnson, but I do have a few things to say in rebuttal: John Donne. George Herbert. Gerard Manley Hopkins. Christina Rosetti.

Have anything to add to the argument?