The capacity to achieve mystical union with God requires the forgetting of one's self, an infatuation with the divine, and, to communicate this experience to us, the capacity of the poet. Initially, Christian mystics reflected upon scriptural poetics. In confronting its figurative and lyrical language they developed an understanding of the poetic capacity of words to embody and express the mystical experience. The development of vernacular mysticism also brought about the flourishing of mystical poetry, which applied the poetic capacity demonstrated in scripture to the description of personal mystical experience. This course will consider some of the consummate poet-mystics of the Latin West. It will examine how the recording of mystical experience in poetic form allows the mystical writer to achieve a result not otherwise possible in discursive terms of communication. In our reading we will see how, through the practice of poetry, language becomes approximate and playful, capable of giving presence to absence, materiality to the immaterial, and lexicon to the non-lexical.