Sainte Chapelle
(Île de la Cité, Paris, France)
BY Angie Estes

And I was enthralled by Emerson’s disciples Dickinson and Melville, with their particular American modern slant on the relationship — not always a pleasant one — between the human and the “divine details” of nature and the universe. Ahab’s invocation to “Hark ye yet again, — the little lower layer” because “All visible objects… are but as pasteboard masks,” along with Rilke’s notion that humans are “the bees of the invisible world” became especially significant for me.

All of this is by way of saying that by the time I encountered medieval writing, art, and architecture, I was primed to fall in love with it. For in a sense I’d been doing a kind of medieval “anagogical” thinking most of life — reading the details of this world in the light of some other world. And I love the whole medieval idea that the world is something that can be read. All of this really came together for me when I read the work of Abbot Suger, who placed gold and precious stones and objets in the chapel of St. Denis and wrote about how aesthetic pleasure and beauty could give rise to mystical ecstasy, how the light from these gems could transport him to “some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of heaven,” by means of which “by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.”

Has studying medieval works influenced your writing?

Medieval thought, writing, art, and architecture were enormously important to my ideas about what a poem can be. For the medieval mind, everything bristles with meaning — nothing is static. And the active, engaged mind is the mind that can be, and is, transported. I think of a poem as one of those things in the world that is filled with “divine details,” and the poem is an arranged place — like the golden chalices, rubies, emeralds, and stained glass windows of Abbot Suger’s chapel — where experience happens. And although this is in some ways a very modernist way of talking about art and poetry, it also has a long lineage, running back through Wallace Stevens and Dickinson — and at least back to medieval thinkers and writers. Flannery O’Connor, too, in her essays about writing fiction, talks about the importance of anagogical thinking.

And of course, the medieval delight in the things of the world, in “divine detail,” is in itself an inexhaustible fascination for both reader and writer. Medieval authors and artists offer perhaps our greatest example of the human imagination in the constant act of reading and writing the world.

The Annunciation, c. 1437-1446
BY Fra Angelico
(Firenze, San Marco, Entrata del Dormitorio)
San Marco Museum

READ AN EXCERPT FROM “San Marco Suite”
BY Angie Estes

Fra Angelico has inspired poems in both Tryst and Voice-Over. What draws you to his art?

Yes, as I was just saying, I believe that a work of art — or a poem — must make an arrangement that creates an experience for a viewer or reader, that pulls the viewer into the work of art so that something happens to the viewer. This seems to me a central preoccupation of medieval thought and art, and Fra Angelico is a master of creating these visual arrangements that are powerful and involving experiences. In his frescoes at San Marco in Firenze, for example, the painting in each of the monk’s cells invokes a moving meditation on a significant moment in the life of Christ but does so within the architectural context specific to each individual cell, thus invoking a kind of anagogical tension between past and present, human and divine, sacred and mundane. Likewise, at the top of the staircase leading up to the cells, Fra Angelico embraces the viewer with his Annunciation, the rainbow hues of the heavenly angel’s wing glistening with the earthly silica Fra Angelico has mixed into his paint.