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 è Scala a Dio: On Charles Wright’s “Belief beyond Belief” Part 5 14. Contemplation and Concretion: Four Marian Lyrics 15. Ambassadors and Votaries of Silence Bibliography Index
This book analyses the distinction between revelation and manifestation, and offers a phenomenological account of “religious poetry” in English, French, and Italian.
Kevin Hart is 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.
Hart’s writing style benefits from his poet’s ear, and Poetry and
Revelation contains passages of great lyrical beauty as well as
intellectual weight … Such passages demonstrate a harmonious
marriage of academic virtuosity and beautiful writing, which gives
the lie to any ill-judged claim that the relationship between
poetry, philosophy, and religion is a zero-sum game.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
Few scholars can claim the sort of wide-ranging expertise that we
see in the work of Kevin Hart. He has made substantial
contributions to Continental philosophy, Christian theology, and
literary criticism, and, in addition to this academic work, he is
one of today’s finest Australian poets. In his new book Poetry and
Revelation, we see these many elements together in one place. The
result is a volume that conveys, perhaps better than any single
previous publication, the scope of his scholarly interests and the
ambition of his constructive project for extending the application
of phenomenology in the Husserlian style to literary and
theological material.
*Literature and Theology*
[T]his is a substantial contribution to the study of religious
poetry, one which broadens and deepens the field of the
phenomenology of religion.
*International Journal for Philosophy of Religion*
Poetry and Revelation, a profound investigation into the
relationship between poetry and religion, gives me a new vision of
the Australian poet-critic Kevin Hart. One need not agree with his
arguments. I for one do not. But that does not matter. In a long
lifetime of trying to understand the vexed relationship between the
imagination and revelation, I have arrived at the judgment that
they are antithetical to one another. Hart argues the reverse. He
does it with surpassing love for poetry, and with a poignant
personal experience of Christian inwardness. His readings of
Hopkins, Geoffrey Hill, Charles Wright, and of the Australian poets
A.D. Hope, Judith Wright, and Robert Gray are fresh and
invigorating. He is equally perceptive on the poetry of Jaccottet
and Montale. Hart breaks new ground for all of us.
*Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of the Humanities and English,
Yale University, USA*
Poetry and Revelation shows all of the virtues we’ve come to
associate with the writings of Kevin Hart: deep learning,
exegetical brio, passionate attentiveness to the subtlest movements
and capabilities of verse. In its close readings and larger
argumentative contentions the book, like its central subject, is a
constant source of surprise and revelation.
*Ian Donaldson, Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of
Culture and Communication, University of Melbourne, Australia*
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