Neguri, Spain: My latest book, Spiritual Quest in Verse, is intended to analyze the poetic works of Ricaredo Demetillo, undoubtedly one of the most gifted poets of the Philippines—and in my mind the best of his generation—and, from the standpoint of his Lazarus, Troubadour, to clarify the poet as a religious poet sui generis. “Religious” here is a generic term, and religion is taken in the Christian framework that entails the Christian morality and takes humanism into account.
My literary criticism of Demetillo’s poetry covers his poetic works from the time he published his first poetry collection in 1956 up to 1976. It was in 1976 when my initial admiration of him as a poet, which began in 1971 when I was still a theology student aspiring for Roman Catholic priesthood, culminated in my writing a thesis on his works as a religious poet. This book is based on that thesis, which I wrote for my Master’s degree in Comparative Literature at the University of the Philippines.
Besides his qualities as a superior poet, what attracts me to Demetillo is our common opposition to clericalism, and his voice on this issue deserves to be heard by a wider audience. Pope Francis has denounced clericalism as “evil,” according to Vatican Radio. This sense of entitlement makes some clerics feel “superior” and “far from the people” so that “they have no time to hear the poor, the suffering, prisoners, the sick.”
To this day, I continue to be against clericalism, informed by my own personal experiences as an Augustinian friar for forty-one years. Clericalism, echoing Pope Francis, is a cancer that gnaws at the very foundations of the Church, and it must be extirpated wherever it is found.
Born in Dumangas, Iloilo on June 2, 1920, Demetillo studied to be a Protestant preacher in Central Philippines College but abandoned his aspiration to become an ordained minister when he realized that his heart lay elsewhere: literature. So he transferred to Silliman University in Dumaguete City where he completed his BA in English in 1947. On a Rockefeller Fellowship grant, he left for the University of Iowa to study poetry. It was in Iowa where he earned in 1952 his Master of Fine Arts in English and Creative Writing, under the guidance of Paul Engle, the long-term director of the Iowa Writers Workshop, and Robert Lowell, an eminent American poet at the time. He further honed his writing craft, particularly in literary criticism, under Kenneth Burke at Indiana State University. At the same time, he also came in contact with noted poets Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, and Richard Blackmur.
Demetillo finds the immanent God through his kinship with fellow artists. Art is calvary; the artist participates in Christ’s calvary. Restless in spirit, the artist can rest in God because he alone is able to fill the void within the artist’s heart.
With an M.F.A. degree under his belt, he returned to the Philippines in 1952, shortly after his graduation from Iowa. He taught at Silliman University and moderated Sands and Coral, the university’s official student publication. In 1955, he relocated to Manila after landing a teaching job at the University of the Philippines where he started to be recognized as a major poet and literary critic. There, he taught literature and humanities until his retirement in 1985. At some point, he was named writer-in-residence by the state university. He continued teaching at the university past retirement as professor emeritus. He died on March 27, 1998.
The idea of writing a literary criticism of Demetillo’s religious poetic works came to me after years of exchanging letters with him. Our correspondence started in the early 1970s and ended only with my regular departures abroad near the end of his life. Work related to my ministry as an Augustinian friar has taken me to the United States, Canada, and now to Spain, where I am assigned at Iglesía del Carmen in Neguri. Demetillo himself has described our correspondence as contributing to his “well-being.”
It is important to remember that this book delves into the religious character, substance, and symbolisms in Demetillo’s poetry rather than into its form or structure. Demetillo, at least publicly, shied away from characterizing his poetic works as religious, seeming rather to emphasize their secular nature, except in the case of The Scare-Crow Christ. In an article, he described the book as containing poems “objectifying the poverty and the spiritual confusion” of troubled times in the Philippines in the early 1970s. It was a turbulent period marked by militant student activism in the capital that sparked massive street demonstrations and violence between students and leftist workers on one hand and the state security forces on the other.
My poetry has been much influenced by the New Criticism in America, but I do not belong to any school. [It] has been concerned with the following major themes: the rebellion of the young against the conventional values of an overly repressive society; the modern journey of the individual from lostness to wholeness and fullest creativity; the rise and fall of civilization, using the myth of Daedalus in ancient Crete to objectify and evoke the human condition; and the important position of the artists as the bearers and the creators of volumes necessary to the renewal of society.
To project all these themes, I have used the lyric, the elegiac, the poetic essay, the epic, etc., with relatively good success. Always I have been concerned with the human condition and also celebrated the hierarchy of light. Strongest influences: Homer, Dante, Baudelaire, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats, and Auden, not to mention myths of all sorts, including the Filipino ones.
My...book "The Scare-Crow Christ" was written mostly during the troubled period of student activism in Manila and contains poems objectifying the poverty and the spiritual confusion of the time. One poem speaks of the indifference of the average man to the welfare of the “diminished, unfulfilled” man and asks, “Are you not Judas to his scare-crow Christ?” Still another one pays “tall tribute to the hardihood of man” that is able to survive the horrors of war in Vietnam and elsewhere. But these new poems are evocations, not propagandistic statements.
My verse drama "The Heart of Emptiness Is Black," really a sort of sequel to "Barter in Panay," deals centrally with the conflict between tribalism and emergent individualism, which may have relevance to the present situation of the Philippines under martial law [the Philippines was under martial rule from 1972 until 1981]. I chose the drama as a form so that I can be heard by the public, for poetry locally is mostly unheard and unread, if not dead. "The City [and the Thread of Light]" objectifies or evokes the lostness of man in the modern city and the poet’s search for any available meaning in the human condition today.
To be sure, Demetillo’s writings run the gamut of the human experience, an indubitable fact noted by one of the Philippines’ foremost literary critics and a colleague of Demetillo at the University of the Philippines, the late Dean Leopoldo Y. Yabes, when he wrote:
Ricaredo Demetillo’s poetry, fiction, and criticism belong to a tradition that is both East and West, and his work is being recognized, though a bit slowly, as a distinct part of the world cultural heritage, a blending of oriental and occidental values. His writings offer a rich mine for the student and the science of culture.
Demetillo deals with a variety of themes: the revolt of youth against oppressive society, the rise and fall of civilizations, the spiritual bankruptcy of language that presages political violence and economic distress, the poet’s Dantean/Faustian journey through the morass of living to the higher life. An important work, the poet himself says, “evokes and proclaims the life-forwarding sacrifices of the artists, the ‘unstable men,’ who are the harbinger of the truths—and values—that invigorate and renew society during critical epochs.” Another critic has observed that his early "La Via: A Spiritual Journey" is the most sustained argument in verse in any language by a Filipino.
...One may discern in the lifework of Demetillo an eloquent argument for the integrity of the artist as both individual human being and as social person. José Garcia Villa, the other major Philippine poet of the twentieth century, may be patronizing towards Demetillo’s social commitments, but Demetillo, while recognizing the superior quality of Villa’s personal lyricism, is proud of his stand. Although both Villa and Demetillo accept the centrality of the formal, or aesthetic, values in a work of art, Villa stops there. Demetillo, however, goes further, looking for additional values that may enhance the beauty and significance of human life. As a poet Demetillo has attained a stature that in Philippine literature is hard to erode and difficult to surpass.
As a religious poet, Demetillo starts with a doubt. After leaving a Protestant seminary in favor of a career in literature, he writes poems that are “rebellious” in the sense that they reject the kind of god that society and the institutionalized Church have imposed upon men.
From rebellion, the poet undertakes a spiritual journey which is actually a flight from wrong values, hypocritical religion, crumbling civilization, and moral corruption. For Demetillo, God is the God of the living, not of the dead. Heaven and hell are within man himself; through self-knowledge, man regains his lost paradise. Love alone heals and forgives.
After his spiritual journey, Demetillo finds the immanent God through his kinship with fellow artists. Art is calvary; the artist participates in Christ’s calvary. Restless in spirit, the artist can rest in God because he alone is able to fill the void within the artist’s heart. The artist is God’s instrument in this world to proclaim and glorify him. Through the life and art of the artist, God is completed in the world of the tangibles.