Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry by Kevin Hart

Abstract

BOOK REVIEWS 163 Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry Kevin Hart Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. xiii + 329 pp. $108.00 hardcover. A poem resides at the heart of every chapter in Kevin Hart’s Poetry and Revelation: For a Phenomenology of Religious Poetry. Hart allows the poetry under analysis to shimmer with its own unique force. More precisely, he shows the reader what it means to shimmer: how each text trembles with meanings that flare and glint according to the angle from which it is contemplated. In both its structure and approach, Poetry and Revelation resembles field-forming works of literary criticism such as Cleanth Brooks’s The Well-Wrought Urn, or Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher’s Practicing New Historicism. The book does what any great work of criticism should do: it redirects the reader’s awe back to the literary works themselves. That it succeeds in allowing the poetry to manifest so vividly testifies to the power of its theoretical approach. Drawing on phenomenology, Poetry and Revelation joins a modest chorus of voices in an attempt to sing a new and generative literary critical methodology into being. The discipline of phenomenology has been imported into literary studies only sporadically and to many different ends. Four decades ago, scholars like Georges Poulet and Wolfgang Iser explored the phenomenology of reading. More recently Bruce Smith and Rita Felski have thought phenomenologically about literature, considering the material conditions of its production as well as our “enchanted” response to it. Still, “phenomenology and/of literature” has yet to constitute a full-blown theoretical school. According to Hart, its moment has long since arrived. Poetry and Revelation explores the interconnectedness of three phenomena. A poet himself, Hart employs a canny metaphor to explain his project. The chapters have “the conceptual shape of triangles, the apexes of which are poetry, religion, and philosophy” (xi). The triangle may be equilateral, or it might stretch itself into an isosceles or scalene form depending on the chapter’s emphases. First and foremost, Hart asks whether phenomenology can help us to read poetry; if so, how? What schools of phenomenology would prove most serviceable? And what happens when the poetry in question is “religious”? How does the category of revelation inflect that of experience? The book comprises five parts, each consisting of between two and four chapters. Part one problematizes the “problem” of religious experience: “Why a poetry that is written coram deo is regarded as necessarily narrower than a poetry written coram hominibus is scarcely self-evident” (4). Part two engages Geoffrey Hill, a poet whose concern with the sacred does not presuppose any creedal commitments. Several contemporary Austra- Religion & Literature 164 lian poets (A. D. Hope, Judith Wright, and Robert Gray) provide the raw material for part three, broadening the scope of the project and taking us into Hart’s native poetic territory. Parts four and five explore questions that have historically energized Christian contemplatives. Four wonders about poetic non-experience and its relationship to apophatic theology (or the via negativa), and five thinks about the relationship of Incarnation to poetic concretion by close-reading four Marian lyrics. The book concludes with a meditation on silence. Hart first provides an overview of some long-held assumptions to which he is responding. He cites Samuel Johnson, T. S. Eliot, and Harold Bloom to demonstrate that—at least in modern times—religious poetry has been considered minor at best, saccharine at worst. Why? The objection stems directly from its relationship to lived experience. These critics agree that “religious poetry cannot draw on the experience appropriate for the writing of major poetry” because it relies on the secondhand knowledge of faith (7). Furthermore, art as such threatens to undermine any expression of the sacred, its own glamor distracting from the transcendent content. Scripture has the last word, as it were, and cannot be surpassed. Nor can authentic prayer ever be poetical according to this way of thinking. Hart argues that this attitude presupposes a category of “religious experience ” that places radical encounters with the divine in too tidy a box. If Husserl taught us to bracket the “natural attitude” in order to allow phenomena to manifest, then...