Poetry and Revelation

For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry

Kevin Hart

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781472598301
• eBook ISBN:
  9781472598325
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Phenomenology in Philosophy

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.

Table of contents

• FC
• Half title
• Also Available From Bloomsbury
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One Experience
• 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: Some phenomenology and theology in “Burnt Norton”
• Part Two On Geoffrey Hil
• 4 God’s little mountains: Young Geoffrey Hill and the problem of religious poetry
• 5 “it / is true”
• 6 Transcendence in tears
• 7 Uncommon equivocation in Geoffrey Hill
• Part Three Three Australian poets
• 8 Susannah without the cherub
• 9 Darkness and lostness: How to read a poem by Judith Wright
• 10 “Only this”: Some phenomenology and religion in Robert Gray
• Part Four Religio Poetæ
• 11 A voice answering a voice: Philippe Jaccottet and the “Dream of God”
• 12 Eugenio Montale and “the other truth”
• 13 “La poesia è scala a dio”: On Charles Wright’s “belief beyond belief”
• Part Five Morning knowledge
• 14 Contemplation and concretion: Four Marian lyrics
• 15 Ambassadors and votaries of silence
• Notes
• Index