Language, Silence, and Anatheistic Epiphanies of the Sacred: A Hermeneutic Phenomenology of Poetr

This thesis is a work in hermeneutic phenomenology, which seeks to develop both carefully descriptive and carefully interpretive studies of poetic texts. I am particularly interested in the new, possible worlds and ways of being opened by poetic texts, as well as the ways that poetry can reveal the present world. I argue that a good text---a true text---should reveal something true about the world, even if this is accomplished via the invention of some other world in which mythological beasts and magical powers exist and justice always carries the day. Poetic imagination, in other words, is constantly figuring and re-figuring reality. In view of these claims, my aim in this thesis is to interrogate the works of recent Continental philosophy and English and American poetry.;In particular, I focus on (1) anatheistic epiphanies of the sacred, or poetic retrievals of the sacred in the material world after the passing away of the otherworldly master God; and (2) the tension between language and silence, by which the language of poetry can help to overcome the imposition of the ego and subjugation of the Other, and can instead open spaces for the silence of the world to be heard. In Chapter One, I will explicate Richard Kearney's understanding of anatheism, which calls us to "revisit the sacred in the midst of the secular." This distinctly post-theist move accepts the critical work of atheism while not being content to rest in this negation. Rather, a new affirmation is called for---a rediscovery of the sacred in even the smallest of things.;In Chapter Two, I will argue that Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens, Galway Kinnell, and William Blake enact anatheistic explorations of the sacred in their poetry. I will begin with selections from the works of Philip Larkin and Wallace Stevens, in which I read an anatheist retrieval of the sacred in the material world. Next, having established anatheism as a hermeneutical method that seeks to recover the sacred in the material world, and having explored the works of poets who show us what this hermeneutics looks like in practice, I will delve deeper into what an anatheist theology looks like in order to offer readings of Galway Kinnell and William Blake. Specifically, I will explicate Kearney's understanding of (1) microtheology, which allows us to locate the divine within the least of these---a God of little things, following the title of Arundhati Roy's novel; and (2) microeschatology, which challenges us to hear the divine may-be---the possibility of God's impossible kingdom to which we give flesh through concrete acts of love and hospitality. Microtheology and microeschatology are two sides of the anatheistic coin, and I will read works by Kinnell and Blake through the lenses of these concepts. In the poetry of Kinnell, I read a microtheology that finds God in the least of these; and in the work of Blake, I read a microeschatological call for justice and for the building of God's kingdom on earth.;In Chapter Three, I will look to Jean-Louis Chretien for an account of the necessity of silence in art, as well as to Gadamer for an account of language as arising out of our encounters with the world and with others rather than simply being the abstract imposition of the Same onto the Other. Such an account stands as an important companion to Kearney's anatheism, insofar as anatheism emphasizes the ethics of human encounters, while Chretien's account offers a way to think through not only hospitality to human others, but to non-human others as well. In other words, Chretien's demand that we not speak over the silence of the world stands as a faithful and necessary expansion of the concerns driving Kearney's work. Furthermore, I will argue that Chretien's and Gadamer's accounts help us to better understand the work of poets such as Li-Young Lee and Wallace Stevens. I will then provide an analysis of the poetics of the Imagist movement. This movement, I will argue, puts into practice many of the ideals not only of Chretien and Gadamer, but of Ricoeur and Kearney as well.;In Chapter Four, I will conduct close readings of Imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who exemplify the practice of not using language as what Pound calls ornamentation, but rather see poetic language as presenting the phenomenological opportunity to be attentive and responsive to the things themselves.