Malcolm Guite

Photo credit: Lancia E. Smith

Poet-Priest Malcolm Guite was Chaplain for 20 years at Girton College, Cambridge, and remains Life Fellow. He lectures widely in England and North America on theology and literature and has published poetry, theology, and literary criticism. He has also worked as a librettist. Among his many books are Sounding the Seasons; Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year (Canterbury 2012) and Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Hodder 2017).

Malcolm has a particular interest in the imagination as a truth-bearing faculty and continues to reflect deeply on how poetry can stimulate and re-awaken our prayer life. He writes Poet’s Corner, a weekly column for the Church Times.

In 2023 Malcolm was awarded the Archbishop Lanfranc Medal for Education and Scholarship by the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Malcolm enjoys sailing, walking, old books, live music, and all the varieties of the British countryside and weather. He has a YouTube series called ‘A Spell in the Library’. Learn more about Malcolm’s work at his website.

Click here to see a list of books by Malcolm Guite

Links to posts and programs featuring Malcolm Guite:

  • The Transformed Vision of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Poet Malcolm Guite explores the dramatic and even prophetic parallels between the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of the titular character in his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (59 minutes)
  • The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
  • The rediscovery of meaning — Poet and theologian Malcolm Guite explains Owen Barfield’s idea of the development of consciousness over time, an evolution made evident through language that reveals an earlier, pre-modern way of seeing the world. (63 minutes)
  • O Come, O Come, Emmanuel: Malcolm Guite and J. A. C. Redford on the Advent O Antiphons — Poet and priest Malcolm Guite and compose J. A. C. Redford talk about how poetry and liturgy invite repetition, and also about how music interprets a text and alters how one inhabits poetry over time. (64 minutes)
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff
  • Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 132 — FEATURED GUESTS: David I. Smith, Susan Felch, D. C. Schindler, Malcolm Guite, and J. A. C. Redford
  • Insights into reality itself — Malcolm Guite on the philosophical concerns underlying Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
  • Beckoning to wisdom — Poet Malcolm Guite and composer J.A.C. Redford talk about their collaboration on a song cycle inspired by the O Antiphons of Advent. (22 minutes)
  • A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)