Every Changing Shape

Mystical Experience and the Making of Poems

Jennings Elizabeth

"Every Changing Shape", published in 1961 and now in paperback for the first time, considers from a Christian poet's perspective how religious or mystical experience informs the imagination. Elizabeth Jennings wrote the book early in her career; it continues to provide crucial readings of her chosen authors and clues to her own poetry.

She avoids terms like "inspiration", "ecstasy", sticking to particulars – words, meanings – rather than ideology or theory. A collection of studies of writers and mystics past and present, it brings literary judgement to bear on a subject neglected in a secular age. Though her first concern is poetry, she draws on prose writers to effect her penetrating explorations.

About the Author

Elizabeth Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1926, and lived most of her life in Oxford, where she moved in 1932. She was educated at Rye St Antony and Oxford High School before reading English at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she began a B. Litt., but left to pursue a career in copy-editing in London. Returning to Oxford to take up a full-time post as a librarian at the city library, Jennings worked briefly at Chatto and Windus before becoming a full-time poet. Her second volume of poetry, "A Way of Looking" (1955), won the Somerset Maugham Award, which allowed her to travel to Rome, a city which had an immense impact on her poetry and Roman Catholic faith. While she suffered from physical and mental ill health from her early thirties, Jennings was a popular and widely read poet. She received the W. H. Smith award in 1987 for "Collected Poems 1953-1985", and in 1992 was awarded a CBE. She died in Rosebank Care Home, Bampton, in 2001 and is buried in Wolvercote Cemetery, Oxford.

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