Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry

Description

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.

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