| Abstract [eng] |
The current work is concerned with the analysis of John Donne’s (1572-1631) and Richard Crashaw’s (1613-1649) religious poems on Christ and Christ-related themes. The goal of this paper is to investigate the underlying meanings of religious metaphors in use by the two poets in terms of John Smith’s phenomenology of the holy and Rudolf Otto’s five elements of the holy: awefulness, overpoweringness, urgency, ontological otherness, and fascination. While John Smith provides a case in point for the difference of the holy from the profane in 'Experience of the Sacred: Readings in the Phenomenology of Religion' (Twiss, Sumner B. 1992), Rudolf Otto’s concepts come from his seminal phenomenological treatise, 'The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-Rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and Its Relation to the Rational' (1936). The method in use is a close reading of the religious poems of Donne and Crashaw in search of those metaphors and the encoded implicative clusters that help reveal and argue for the presence of the poetic of holiness, which will then be read in light of the theoretical work of Smith and Otto to pinpoint certain phenomenological aspects of the Christian poetry under study. The evaluative analysis establishes both the extensive reality of the holy ‘other’ in the two poets’ spiritual verse as well as emphasis on rationalisation and the element of awefulness in Donne in contrast to the greater artistry and presence of the fascinating in Crashaw. |
