Tasting the Transcendent

Abstract

Modern views of poetry tend to concord with Wallace Stevens’s insistence that “God and the imagination are one,” assuming that the only meaning there is in the natural world is that which the poet makes. But Denise Levertov held instead that the poet’s word is a response to the beauty of the world as given by God, and that the poet’s task is to invite the reader to resonate with that experience. Drawing on current research from neurocognitive poetics that indicates how readers experience beauty in language, this essay seeks to demonstrate how Levertov’s poem, “O Taste and See,” embodies an invitation for the reader to engage one’s senses in the discovery of God through the beauty of poetry and created being.