"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...

"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...