This course will consider some of the consummate poet-mystics of Western Christianity, including Iacopone, Dante, Hadewijch, Silesius, Traherne, and Blake. 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 communication.

Readings will explore how, through the practice of mystical poetry, language becomes approximate and playful, capable of giving presence to absence, materiality to the immaterial, and lexicon to the non-lexical. It is recommended that graduate students have some facility in at least one language in addition to the language of instruction (Italian, Dutch, German).