Kevin Hart Takes on Immense Task of Triangulating Poetry, Philosophy, & Revelation

For the Los Angeles Review of Books, Christopher Watkin takes a look at Kevin Hart's Poetry and Revelation (Bloomsbury, 2017), "a volume comprised largely of collected talks and reworked articles dating from 2000 to 2015" in which Hart makes a case "for the important place of religious verse in the poetic canon." 

Poetry and Revelation is not less than a series of sensitive readings and bold reinterpretations of the work of a range of religious poets, but it is much more than that. This is a book with a vision of a peaceful, nay mutually enhancing ménage à trois. In Hart’s own terms, the volume takes the “conceptual shape” of a triangle with its three apexes of philosophy, revelation, and poetry undergoing equilateral, isosceles, and scalene transformations in each chapter.

It is a triangulation of themes that reflects Hart’s own polymathic expertise. Author of 13 collections of poems from 1978 to 2011, he is also Edwin B. Kyle Professor of Christian Studies and chair of the Religious Studies department at the University of Virginia and has published four monographs on Maurice Blanchot, in addition to volumes on Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Emmanuel Lévinas, many of which engage deeply with Christian theology. Hart also has intimate familiarity with the rhythms and attitudes of monastic life, having taken regular retreats with the Cistercian Fathers of the Abbey of Notre Dame (Tarrawarra, Australia).

It is just as well that Hart has the necessary credentials to undertake this triangular study. For the size and delicacy of the three-body problem he faces in Poetry and Revelation demands all of his poetic, philosophical, and religious knowhow. The relation between any two of the three apexes already poses its own set of complex problems. What is religious poetry? What does philosophy have to do with poetry? How can there be a philosophy of revelation? To consider two of these apexes in a single volume might be considered a bold undertaking; to attempt all three is a task that can issue only in impressive success or hubristic failure.

Read out what the task issues most at LARB.