The third annual First Things Poetry Prize has issued its final call for submissions, with a deadline of June 30. This year, poet and critic James Matthew Wilson serves as the outside judge, and the stakes are both modest and profound: $2,000 for the winner, $1,000 for the runner-up, and publication in a journal known for uniting faith with intellectual rigor. Entrants may submit up to two poems of no more than forty lines each. Yet behind this announcement lies a deeper question: why does poetry—especially in an age of distraction—still hold spiritual weight?

For the seeker of wisdom, poetry is not mere ornament. It is a form of contemplative discipline, a way of seeing that resists the flattening of the modern world. The ancient traditions understood this: the Psalms of the Hebrew Bible, the hymns of the Rig Veda, the mystical verses of Rumi and Kabir—all were crafted not just to delight but to orient the soul toward the divine. In the Christian tradition, poets like Dante, George Herbert, and Gerard Manley Hopkins used meter and image to map the landscape of grace. The First Things prize, by honoring new verse, continues this lineage—reminding us that beauty is not optional but essential to spiritual health.

Why does this matter now? Because we live in an era that prizes speed over depth, information over wisdom. A poem of forty lines demands something rare: stillness. It asks the reader to slow down, to attend to each word as if it were a stone in a mosaic. This is the same discipline required for prayer or meditation. The poet, like the mystic, works with language to create a space where the ordinary becomes translucent, where the material hints at the eternal. As the poet and theologian Scott Cairns has written, the best poems “enact a kind of knowing that is not merely conceptual but experiential.” They do not explain the sacred; they evoke it.

For the reader seeking practical insight, consider this: the act of writing or reading poetry can be a form of spiritual practice. The constraint of a line break or a rhyme scheme mirrors the discipline of a rule of life—a structure that does not confine but liberates. In submitting to the poem, one submits to something larger than the self. The First Things prize, in its small way, invites both poets and readers into this submission. Whether you are a writer or a contemplative, the call is the same: attend to the words, and through them, to the Word that speaks beyond all words. The deadline is near, but the invitation to see anew is always open.