"Poetry and prayer are very similar"
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Duffy’s line slips a quiet provocation into a comparison that sounds, at first blush, almost polite. Put poetry beside prayer and you’re not just talking about “beautiful words.” You’re pointing at a shared human technology: language used under pressure, language asked to do more than report reality. Prayer is speech aimed at an unseen listener; poetry is often speech aimed at an unseen part of the self, or at a future reader you have to believe exists. Both ask for attention the way a candle asks for darkness.
The subtext is especially Duffy: suspicion of official pieties, coupled with a serious respect for ritual. As a poet who has written vividly about intimacy, grief, and the body, she’s attuned to how people reach for forms when ordinary talk collapses. Prayer and poems both come with inherited structures (meter, stanza; liturgy, confession) that paradoxically free you to say the unsayable. Constraint becomes a kind of permission.
Context matters, too. Duffy’s career sits in a Britain where traditional religious authority has thinned, but the appetite for ceremony and meaning hasn’t. In that landscape, poetry can look like a secular chapel: a place to rehearse thanks, rage, doubt, pleading. The line also smuggles in a defense of poetry’s seriousness. If prayer is allowed to be repetitive, passionate, contradictory, even irrational, then poetry can claim the same license - not as self-indulgence, but as a disciplined form of longing.
The subtext is especially Duffy: suspicion of official pieties, coupled with a serious respect for ritual. As a poet who has written vividly about intimacy, grief, and the body, she’s attuned to how people reach for forms when ordinary talk collapses. Prayer and poems both come with inherited structures (meter, stanza; liturgy, confession) that paradoxically free you to say the unsayable. Constraint becomes a kind of permission.
Context matters, too. Duffy’s career sits in a Britain where traditional religious authority has thinned, but the appetite for ceremony and meaning hasn’t. In that landscape, poetry can look like a secular chapel: a place to rehearse thanks, rage, doubt, pleading. The line also smuggles in a defense of poetry’s seriousness. If prayer is allowed to be repetitive, passionate, contradictory, even irrational, then poetry can claim the same license - not as self-indulgence, but as a disciplined form of longing.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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