This book does not study religious ideas for their own sake, but how religious ideas are turned into verbal imitations of religious experience by poetic structure. Even such words as ‘ecstasy’ or ‘mysticism’ denote clear-cut concepts. The book investigates how such a conceptual language can convey such non-conceptual experiences as meditation, ecstasy or mystic insights. Briefly, it explores how the poet, by using words, can express the ‘ineffable’. It submits to close reading English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and Hebrew texts, from the Bible, through medieval, renaissance, metaphysical, and baroque poetry, to (secular) romantic and symbolistic poetry.

Reuven Tsur is professor emeritus of Hebrew Literature at Tel Aviv University, and Middle East vice president of the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics. He has developed a theory of cognitive poetics, and applied it to rhyme, sound symbolism, poetic rhythm, metaphor, poetry and altered states of consciousness, period style, genre, archetypal patterns, translation theory, and critical activities. His books in English include Poetic Rhythm: Structure and Performance—An Empirical Study in Cognitive Poetics (1998), Toward a Theory of Cognitive Poetics (1992), What Makes Sound Patterns Expressive: The Poetic Mode of Speech-Perception (1992), On Metaphoring (1987), The Road to “Kubla Khan” (1987) and A Perception-Oriented Theory of Metre (1977).

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Introduction: Means, Effects, and Assumptions
• Poem, Prayer and Meditation
• The Ultimate Limit—Appresentation and Transcendence
• “Composition of Place”, Experiential Set, and the Meditative Poem
• Mystic Poetry—Metaphysical, Baroque and Romantic
• The Sublime and the Absolute Limit
• Rhythmic Structure and Religious Poetry—The Numinous, the Infernal, and Agnus Dei
• Visual and Auditory Ingenuities in Mystic Poetry
• Oceanic Dedifferentiation, “Thing Destruction” and Mystic Poetry
• The Infernal and the Hybrid—Bosch and Dante
• Let There be Light and the Emanation of Light—The Act of Creation in Ibn Gabirol and Milton
• Light, Fire, Prison: A Cognitive Analysis of Religious Imagery in Poetry
• The Asymmetry of Sacred, Sexual, and Filial Love in Figurative Language
• References
• Index

· ISBN 0-907845-44-4 · Published in June 2003 by Imprint Academic · Hardback · 330 pages · $49.90 ·

Order Online:

For more information contact us at 800-444-2419; 434-220-3300, or by e-mail at order@pdcnet.org .