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 Jo Rae Wright University Distinguished Professor in the School of Divinity at Duke University, USA. He also holds a secondary appointment in the Department of English at Duke University, USA.

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