Faith & Spirit Quote by Al Purdy

Purdy’s line lands with the blunt, Canadian plainspokenness he made a literary signature: a refusal of the expected confession, delivered as if he’s shrugging in a kitchen doorway. The double negative - “not religious,” then “not in any formal sense” - performs a careful sidestep. He’s not grandstanding as an atheist, and he’s not genuflecting to inherited pieties either. The kicker, “not in any God sense,” narrows the escape hatch: whatever he’s after, it isn’t metaphysics with a capital G.

The subtext is less about disbelief than about sovereignty. Purdy is staking a claim for the poet’s kind of reverence: attached to weather, labor, sex, memory, landscape, the small mortal shocks that don’t need a church to certify them. The phrasing matters. “Formal sense” suggests institutions, paperwork, approved language - the social machinery of belief. By contrast, his tone implies that meaning is still on the table, just not as dogma. It’s the difference between spirituality as experience and religion as membership.

Contextually, Purdy wrote out of mid-century Ontario and the postwar literary project of making “ordinary” life speak without pretending to be refined. Canada’s cultural DNA includes both Protestant moral inheritance and a skeptical modernity; Purdy’s stance threads that needle. He declines the God-talk without forfeiting awe, positioning poetry as the place where the sacred survives, stripped of official branding and put back in the mouth of a regular person.