<i>Lands of Likeness: For a Poetics of Contemplation</i> by KevinHart (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2023), xi + 410 pp.

On finishing the book and reflecting not just upon what had been read but the experience of reading it, a question comes immediately to mind: for whom is the book written? There are several possibilities: contemporary representations of Schleiermacher's ‘cultured despisers’ of religion; Christians concerned alike with the aesthetic experience and contemplation; secularists peeping through the windows of mystics; the spiritual but not religious; the religious but uncommitted; the literary critic; the post-Kantian philosopher; or a combination of any of these. The focus of any implied reader shifts continually in the volume, likewise the tone and the identification of the writer with any particular standpoint. The Christian tradition of contemplation is maintained throughout; there is even a strong identifying ‘we’ with Roman Catholicism when discussing Geoffrey Hill's poetry (not Hill's own conviction). But the whole exploration is framed by the figure of an ancient Greco-Roman religious practice: the templum and auspicy, the reading of omens from birds flying across an open sky. And somehow into this ominous space is inserted Richard of St. Victor and his confrère Achard of St. Victor (who provides the title of the book ‘lands of likeness’). Not that the intention (or rather intentions) of the book is unclear. As set out in the Introduction, Hart is ‘proposing a hermeneutic of contemplation’ (11) and is arguing how classical phenomenology (Husserl) has a place in developing that hermeneutic. But the book arises from Hart's Gifford Lectures and so, in honouring the Gifford obligation, there is a concern to relate contemplation, hermeneutics, phenomenology and poetry to natural theology. Three hundred tightly packed pages later, in the Afterword, we return to these intentions and find the categories have been greatly expanded. The nature of contemplation is ‘open’ and likewise any hermeneutic of contemplation; the ‘category of natural theology is thereby expanded’ (324) beyond concerns with proofs and argumentation. But it is the execution of the intentions, its sometimes ostentatious erudition (with over 70 pages of compendious notes), and its practice of ‘spacious reading’ (314) that makes any overall assessment of what has been achieved difficult. It is hard to see the landscape we as readers have travelled through, and what claims are being made about the ‘likeness’ of these lands. The opening chapters (1-3) delineate the historical, philosophical, aesthetic and religious strategies that will inform what follows. Following accounts by Richard of St. Victor and Aquinas, modes of contemplative experience are drawn out: consideratio, meditatio, contemplatio, lectio divina, dilatio mentis, principally. These are then dialectically used later when the terms, or their modern employment by various poets, are used to establish comparisons between practices and experiences. Then we move, in chapter 2, to modern post-Kantian philosophy and a parallel between the writing and reading of poetry and the act of beholding and the self responding affectively and cognitively. This prepares the ground for chapter 3 on Schopenhauer, Coleridge, and Husserl and the development of transcendental thinking after Kant. Here is a markedly different understanding of transcendental from the mediaevals encountered in chapter 1 (although I am not sure Coleridge's Platonism does not blur any line between transcendental and transcendence). Chapter 3 is the most complicated part of the book in terms of its connections with the mediaevals, and the least integrated with what follows. It is evidently needed to offer the philosophical grounds for anchoring the hermeneutic and phenomenology that develop the ‘poetics’ (which I take here to be a theory of disclosure with respect to poetic form and aesthetics more generally): ‘classical phenomenology provides us with sufficient means to clarify and complement the hermeneutic of contemplation that we have already started to trace in Schopenhauer and Coleridge’ (75), Hart tells us. Hermeneutics seems to mean ‘a way of reading as’ and a way to justify the readings of poetry that we will now embark upon. I am not sure it follows that such a hermeneutics adds anything to the reading, and hence my sense that this theorizing is not very integrated (or simply gets lost) into the readings that follow. For with chapter 4 we move to the poetry with Gerard Manley Hopkins. Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover’ acts as an application of the hermeneutics and an examination of contemplation. The chapter opens with a return to Richard of St. Victor and concludes with a few sentences relating Richard, through the Hopkins’ poem, to Schopenhauer, Coleridge and Husserl. Perhaps here we needed more to explain the moves, the differences and what these demonstrate. But, as I said, there are only a few sentences and then we move to chapter 5 developing the category of ‘fascination’ as distinct from more contemplative modes of reading a poem. We pick up Coleridge again, but this time as the author of ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’. The topic is first approached philosophically and theologically (Kant, Marx, Otto, Heidegger, Schleiermacher)—though the theology throughout the volume is pious rather than penetrating. Marianne Moore, in chapter 6, assists with developing ‘consideration’ as another distinct form of reading experience; chapter 7 and 8 provide an exposition and commentary on a reading of Wallace Steven's long poem ‘Notes towards a Supreme Fiction’; chapter 9 and 10 a similar exposition and commentary on A.R. Ammons’ long poem ‘Sphere: The Form of a Motion’; chapters 11 and 12 examine Geoffrey Hill's long poem ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy’ in the same way; and, finally, there is an Afterword. The reader follows (and sometimes wades) through the philosophical analysis and scholarly editorial commentary and précis. The hermeneutical scaffolding falls away (except for minor references) as the literary appreciation is developed (poetics as the art of writing). The Christian theological, contemplative and mystical tradition appears and disappears as some kind of foil with respect to which different reading experiences of the explicitly religious (Hopkins), the quasi-religious (Stevens), the assertively secular (Ammons) and the unlocatable (Hill) poets are lengthily examined. We are caught up in the intersections of ‘my [Hart's] train of thought’ (318), and that thinking moves often orthogonally and by association, across several languages, ancient and modern. While this movement is in line with Richard of St. Victor's description of ‘Thinking [that] wanders through whatever bye-ways, with a slow pace, without regard for arrival’ (cited on 250), and therefore renders the book itself a mode of consideratio or contemplatio, it makes for mystifying reading. As a performative piece of writing, I am again thrown back on the question, for whom is it intended? Who is the audience? Any general reader would have to be well acquainted with the long poems of Stevens, Ammons or Hill despite, or even because of, the commentary, because one is not entirely sure where the voices of the poet and the voice of Hart part company. We may enter Hart's contemplation on these and the other poems he examines, but then the contemplative experience that might be on offer in the poems is being filtered, rather than elicited, for us. Or are these readings offered as examples of the way contemplative reading might proceed? It is not clear, despite some highly polished insights, some treasures of erudition and some beautiful turns of phrase. The focus of the book's intentions becomes diffuse; its ambitions sprawl. Does the appeal to kenôsis, consideratio, meditatio, contemplatio, lectio divina, and dilatio mentis add anything to the experiences of these poems? For it is reading experience which is front and foreground here. There is certainly a binding and abiding relation between poetry and meditation as both require the creative imagination. Where there is creativity there is hope and where there is hope there is some scintilla of the eschatological. If we wish to make a distinction between meditation and contemplation, then with some poetry we edge towards the dissolution of vocabularies, the more apophatic languages of negation, the dissonances of oxymoron and paradox. Hart knows and shows this, with respect to mystical writings. When he turns to the poetry, certain poems demand to be read in ways that push the dispossession of any reader absorbed in a piece of writing towards reflections upon what is continually eluding us. Of Stevens’ poetic art, he writes: ‘we are being taught to contemplate in the very act of reading the poem: we search restlessly to join dependent part to dependent part in quest of a whole that delights and swells our consciousness while all the time escaping it as a complete whole’ (203-4). But that use of ‘contemplation’ with respect to Stevens is a quite distant cousin of Aquinas’ theological understanding of contemplatio. Likeness is being stretched, its elasticity weakened without some metaphysics of analogy. Though what Hart demonstrates is that this activity in which the aesthetic and the religious share a ‘land of likeness’, however we name it, does not concern what is being beheld (God or a snail). Attention here is being paid to the poetic disclosure and the reader's participation in it. A phenomenology (rather than either a hermeneutics or poetics) of reading is offered. Other writers have explored this territory, such as George Steiner in his Real Presences (1991). If the essays of the American poet Jane Hirshfield (Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry [1997]; Ten Windows: How Great Poems Transform the World [2017]) or the essays of the British poet Alice Oswald, are anything to go by, the modes of experience relating poetry and contemplation concern forms and degrees of effacement that arise from this participation and a mediated admittance into what is beheld. There is much ground here for both theology and religion to investigate since participation is a key category in appreciating the sacramentals (in the broad, mediaeval sense of that term) and understanding the liturgical through being disciplined by it (what used to be called mystagogy). Hermeneutics or poetics may well have much to enlighten us as frames for commentary and interpretation. But I am not sure they can help very much with respect to exploring levels of absorption and attentiveness, what is unsaid in being said. Reading, after some basic learning, is not about technique but letting go. In the letting go you learn how to read (and write) more attentive to ambiguity and nuance. There are some wonderful passages in this book, among them the work on Richard of St. Victor, the reflections of Coleridge, the poetry of Moore, Stevens and Hill, but it gets stuck between a phenomenology of poetic beholding, mediaeval spirituality, literary appreciation and an ambitious attempt to fuse these discourses into an interpretative frame (hermeneutics) and an aesthetic formalism (poetics). The movements among Christian theology, philosophy, religious studies more broadly, and literature are deft but diffuse any sense of a cohesive and intelligible form. I expected something more. I anticipated profound insights of a poetic and religious nature. I was disappointed, whilst still left wondering if I had missed something. Perhaps the central argument is just overcooked in the move from lectures to monograph, or perhaps I am not among the implied readers of this volume.

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