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This article investigates the phenomenon of poetic prayer as one that happens in the liminal space between the in-vocation of a close relationship with God and the provocation of versatile responses to God’s presence. The hermeneutic in-between of an experience of God—intimate, ecstatic, and absolutizing, but also unsettling, doubting, and desperate—engenders a genuine possibility to investigate the less obvious aspects of poetry as prayer, and to delve deeper into its complexities and subtleties. The analyzed poems by G. M. Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, and R. M. Rilke disclose the inner world of a human being who yearns for God, but also has the courage to question and listen to an inner voice that torments and tears asunder. A hermeneutic reading of poetry as prayer invites us to acknowledge that an authentic and close relationship with God goes beyond an equivocal and facile response and entails what is sidelined, destabilizing, or even threatening to the safe self. The hermeneutic examination of poetic prayer also inspires us to think of the human body as a legitimate and meaningful site of the encounter between the human and the divine.

Copyright of Phainomena is the property of Phenomenological Society of Ljubljana and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Logos: A Journal, of Religion, Philosophy Comparative Cultural Studies & Art (08687692) is the property of Logos and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A significant strain of thought in European modernist literature identified the formal achievement and classic timelessness to which its high art aspired with the historical aristocracy and its traditions. At the same time, modernist authors portrayed the twentieth-century deadend of this aristocracy through the demise of one of its potent symbols: the horseman-soldier. Novelists (Proust, Ford, Roth) explored the class-inflected idea of the artwork within depictions of a changing society. Lyric poets (Rilke, Yeats) located an aristocratic realm of aesthetic play apparently outside of history. Both kinds of writers assimilated this artistic/noble realm with childhood immaturity on the one hand, with death on the other. In this attraction to an expiring aristocracy, such modernism was uncertain how grown-up and modern it wanted to be. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]