Shahn and Wilder Speak

The poetry of Robinson Jeffers and Edith Sitwell represents the heresy that Christianity's power has been gained by an appeal through the Crucifixion to "man's hidden lust for blood," the Reverend Amos N. Wilder, Hollis Professor of Divinity, said at his fourth William Belden Noble ecture ast night.

In his talk entitled "Cassandra and Atropos: Jeffers and Sitwell," Rev. Wilder praised modern skeptics for rejecting the "perverted version" of the Passion propounded by these and other poets. He felt that the importance of the Crucifixion lies in the "objective intervention" of God, not in the suffering of Christ.

Jeffers, "a twentieth century Cassandra," felt that Christ had "shamed an age," and that His crucifixion had given Western people a "lust for blood," the speaker asserted. Wilder cited Jeffers' work, "Dear Judas," in which the poet asserts that Christ realizes that His power over man is achieved through suffering.

Wilder regarded Miss Sitwell as a "Sibyl of archaic tradition," and felt that she speaks like Atropos, one of the three Fates. He compared her treatment of the catastrophies of man to that of Jeffers, and felt that she was "a modern revelation of St. John."

In scorning the poets' flxation on "Cross-tianity," Wilder questioned the historical accuracy of such forms of Christ's suffering as His crown of thorns and His whippings. Most of the morbidity which has become associated with Christianity is a survival of primitive legends, he asserted.

Wilder will deliver his final lecture of the 1956 series, "Theology and Modern Literature," at 8 p.m. this evening in Memorial Church. He will speak on "Faulkner and Vestigial Moralities.