Poetry and Revelation

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 Revelation is 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.

IntroductionPart 11. Poetry and Revelation: Hopkins, Counter-Experience and Reductio2. "For the Life Was Manifested": On "Material Spirit" in Hopkins3. Eliot's Rose-GardenPart 24. God's Little Mountains5. "it / is true"6. Transcendence in Tears7. Uncommon Equivocation in HillPart 38. Susannah without the Cherub9. Darkness and Lostness: A Poem by Judith Wright10. "Only This": Some Phenomenology and Religion in Robert GrayPart 411. A Voice Answering a Voice: Philippe Jaccottet and the "Dream of God"12. Eugenio Montale and the Other Truth13. La Poesia è Scala a Dio: On Charles Wright's "Belief beyond Belief"Part 514. Contemplation and Concretion: Four Marian Lyrics15. Ambassadors and Votaries of SilenceBibliographyIndex