Can You Cuss In Christian Poetry?—Benjamin P. Myers

"A poet shouldn’t smooth things over, shouldn’t try to give us a golden world in which dock hands or fraternity boys talk like Sunday school teachers."

by Benjamin P. Myers

The writer who thinks it is somehow more pious to present the world as perfect, must wrestle with the reality of the fallen world nonetheless. As Flannery O’Connor writes in Mystery and Manners:

“The serious writer has always taken the flaw in human nature as his starting point, usually the flaw in an otherwise admirable character. Drama usually bases itself on the bedrock of original sin, whether the writer thinks in theological terms or not. Then, too, any character in a serious novel is supposed to carry a burden of meaning larger than himself. The novelist doesn’t write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, a total experience of human nature at any time.”

Whether you are writing a novel or a poem, O’Connor believes that you have the obligation to faithfully depict the sense of something lacking in the fallen world. She notes that the sense of “drama,” of tension and import, in a work of literature depends on telling about fallen people in a fallen world.

This faithful depiction extends even to fallen people’s tendency to use very fallen diction.

What ought we to think of “bad language” in poetry? Should the Christian poet avoid all potentially offensive language? Is recourse to “swear words” a sure sign of a weak vocabulary, as so many of our mothers told us?

Perhaps the most relevant Scripture to this question is Ephesians 4:29, with its injunction to “Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear.” It would be a travesty of biblical interpretation, however, to limit the definition of “corrupting talk” to the level of diction, as if God didn’t care what we said, only how we said it.