Incarnational Poetics

Incarnational Poetics offers a lively engagement with contemporary debates regarding the close reading of poetry, particularly as seen in neo-Formalism's proclaimed "return" to the text. It looks back to the nineteenth century to consider how the establishment of English Literature as an academic discipline related to contemporaneous Higher Criticism of the Bible. Suggesting that this comparison reveals a foundational relationship between interpreting the body of the divine and the body of the poem, the book uses this as a springboard for thinking about what we undertake when we 'close read' a poem and how this has shaped poetry reading across the subsequent centuries. Focusing its discussion through a progression from 'body' to 'voice' and finally to a secular-materialist reading of the 'word made flesh' the book reveals how theological engagement with the divine body contributes to secular methods of poetry appreciation, and questions the implications of that for public engagement with poetry in a postmodern materialist age.