Christian Poetry

     Before the advent of Form Criticism it was considered that to study the scriptures as literary forms: poetry, songs, history, allegory, fables/parables, theology, etc. was to diminish the scriptures by not affording them their proper respect.  Extreme adherents of Form Criticism did this very thing, considering the scriptures only as literary forms.  Modern Biblical interpretation incorporates the idea that the Bible includes all these various forms of literature into its interpretation of the Bible as scripture. 

    Hebrew poetry is not based on rhyme or meter as much as parallelism.  The main forms are synonymous parallelism (the meaning of the two lines or phrases is similar), antithetical parallelism (the meaning of the two lines or phrases is opposite), and synthetic parallelism (in which the parts of speech correspond to their parallel and the second adds something to the ide of the first).  Other poetic forms are acrostics, beginning each line of a poem with the same letter, etc.  The Psalms and Proverbs are the most obvious examples but poetry occurs throughout the entire Old Testament. 

     Luke in the New Testament contains several poems.  Pieces of Christian hymns occur in Paul's letters.

     A Christian poetry website is:

     www.poetry-online.org/christian-poetry-index.htm

     Another is www.christianpoems.co.uk/ where poets can submit their own poetry and search the collected poems by subject.