Blowing Clover Falling Rain: A Theological Commentary on the Poetic Canon of the American Religion

The field of theopoetics explores the ways in which we make God (present)--particularly through language. This book explores questions of theopoetics as they relate to the central poetry of the American Sublime. It offers a fresh theological engagement with what literary critic Harold Bloom terms the American religion (transcendentalism: Emersons homespun mysticism). Specifically it seeks to rehabilitate Emersons concept of self-reliance from the charge of gross egoism by situating it in the context of normative mysticisms Eastern and Western. It undertakes a more poetic approach to reading theologically-inflected poetry by exegeting four poets collectively constituting Blooms American religious canon Ralph Waldo Emerson Walt Whitman Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane. It utilizes a modified version of the ancient fourfold allegorical mode of reading Scripture to draw out theological dimensions of four quintessential texts (Nature Song of Myself Sunday Morning Lachrymae Christi) in order to offer a more imaginative way of reading imaginative writing. Building on Emersons contention just as there is creative writing there is creative reading and Blooms claim a theory of poetry . . . must be poetry before it can be of any use in interpreting poems it demonstrates the unique viable ways in which poems are able to do theology--and perform or embody theopoetic truths.