W. Travis Helms

The field of theopoetics explores the ways in which we "make God" (present)--particularly through language. This book explores questions of theopoetics as they relate to the central poetry of the American Sublime. It offers a fresh, theological engagement with what literary critic Harold Bloom terms the American religion (transcendentalism: Emerson's homespun mysticism). Specifically, it seeks to rehabilitate Emerson's concept of self-reliance from the charge of gross egoism, by situating it in the context of normative mysticisms Eastern and Western. It undertakes a more poetic approach to reading theologically-inflected poetry, by exegeting four poets collectively constituting Bloom's American religious "canon": Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane. It utilizes a modified version of the ancient fourfold allegorical mode of reading Scripture, to draw out theological dimensions of four quintessential texts (Nature, "Song of Myself, " "Sunday Morning, " "Lachrymae Christi"), in order to offer a more imaginative way of reading imaginative writing. Building on Emerson's contention, "just as there is creative writing, there is creative reading, " and Bloom's claim, "a theory of poetry … must be poetry, before it can be of any use in interpreting poems, " it demonstrates the unique, viable ways in which poems are able to "do" theology--and perform or embody theopoetic truths.

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