My Harvard Dissertation | Spiritual Poetics

Well, beginning in March, I'll be hosting a course on my theory of spiritual poetics that I advanced in my dissertation at Harvard University. This will be a bit different though from my other courses. This course will be a little bit more scholarly than my usual content. Um, although the lectures are more academic, they are written so that non-academics can follow along and they may require a little more study than uh my usual content.

But I will be walking through the major concepts in the developments of romantic era scholarship and talking about the contribution that mine makes. So in this video I'd like to share with you my theory of spiritual poetics in my dissertation to show how it works in closely reading a poem. So we'll closely read one and I'll also talk about the course when it will meet and what it will do. So first let's talk about spiritual poetics.

At the first fundamental level, poetics is a theory of how poetry is composed and enjoyed. Poetics defines the the very specific power of what poetry is and what it does and how it works. It's concerned with the creative activity of how it's shaped and also how it's received by the consciousness of the reader. Helen Venler once wrote that poems are enactments of mobile consciousness and as a result of experiencing a poem as mobile consciousness.

It's it it it orders experience into something understood by the poem itself. So much of the most celebrated poetry of the romantics, William Blake, William Werdsworth, John Keats, Percy Bish, Shelley is deeply associated with states of consciousness that should be called spiritual that we might otherwise categorize as spiritual. Sometimes ecstasis, sometimes experiences of transcendence. So it's in this sense that I use the word spiritual and spiritual poetics.

Spiritual in this sense refers to those transformations of consciousness that produce what we call culture, human cognition, human feeling, uh, human will, as as someone like Rudolph Steiner might say. And I'll get to how this works in my longer introductory lecture. But for now, I'll say this. Put in the simplest terms, spiritual poetics is the theory that poetry formally encodes and enacts a spiritual experience through the poetic form, through the reading of it.

That poems do not just describe a spiritual experience like like a document might describe. It's not ...