Poetry and Revelation For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry [Hardcover]

Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about experience are given to us by phenomenology.Poetry and Revelationis the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of religious poems, some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.Kevin Hartis Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies at the Department of Religious Studies, University of Virginia, USA. He also holds professorships in the Department of English and the Department of French. He has written a number of scholarly books, edited collections, and written several volumes of poetry.

Introduction

Part 1

1. Poetry and Revelation: Hopkins, Counter-Experience and Reductio

2. For the Life Was Manifested: On Material Spirit in Hopkins

3. Eliot's Rose-Garden

Part 2

4. God's Little Mountains

5. it / is true

6. Transcendence in Tears

7. Uncommon Equivocation in Hill

Part 3

8. Susannah without the Cherub

9. Darkness and Lostness: A Poem by Judith Wright

10. Only This: Some Phenomenology and Religion in Robert Gray

Part 4

11. A Voice Answering a Voice: Philippe Jaccottet and the Dream of God

12. Eugenio Montale and the Other Truth

13. La Poesia ? Scala a Dio: On Charles Wright's Belief beyond Belief

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