“A finely written and deeply perceptive examination of the roots and resonances of the transcendentalist tradition in American literature, this book makes a strong case for a quite fresh reading of this tradition in the light of the wider religious traditions of East and West, and with a keen ear for echoes of some surprisingly central theological themes. It is a rich and original essay by a writer with a keen poetic sensibility.”
—Rowan Williams

“As erudite as it is eloquent, Travis Helms’ book offers a first-rate treatment of American poetry and religion, and of the tradition of American religious poetry. Rooted in the complexities of literary canonicity and criticism, Helms’ illuminating treatment of four of the founding poets of the ‘American Sublime’ reminds us of the abiding importance of the religious to the American literary imagination. . . . Scholars of American poetry and literary history, as well as those working at the intersection of literature and religion, and theopoetics, will find this book a significant contribution to their fields of study.”
—David C. Mahan, Yale Divinity School

About

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: Emerson’s homespun mysticism). Specifically, it seeks to rehabilitate Emerson’s 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 Bloom’s 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 Emerson’s contention, “just as there is creative writing, there is creative reading,” and Bloom’s 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.

From the Foreword

This is a timely book. America, like the rest of the world, is being forced by the pandemic crisis to make a radical reassessment of priorities and purpose, a reframing of narrative and a search for a new sense of identity, both personal and national. Travis Helms’s important re-appraisal of the great poets in the ‘canon of the American Religion,’ as Harold Bloom called it, will offer vital insights and a fresh resource for all those, in America and beyond, who care for literature and realize that the way we read, and what we read, is essential to our common spiritual awareness and development. 

…

This book makes an important contribution to that new way of learning, and especially because it offers us some hope. Helms shows us definitively, that running through these writers is a core of mystical insight, a capacity to experience the transcendent in and through the immanent. He also shows that underlying that intrinsic mystical experience, which Emerson and all the writers here believed was available to all, there is a pattern, a purpose, an objective meaning which nevertheless expresses itself in and through our subjective experience. And Helms is bold, in these pages, to see in that pattern and purpose some glimmering of that perennial truth, at once subjective and objective, to which both the philosophers and the theologians have given the name Logos.

—Malcolm Guite, Girton College, Cambridge.