The dialectic of experience has its proper fulfillment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to experience that is made possible by experience itself. Now is a great time to be a literary scholar interested in interdisciplinary work with the sciences. While in the early days, scientifically minded critics fought for the floor in a field dominated by constructivist accounts of the self, today their work has settled into its own legitimacy, aided substantially by the increasing power and relevance (...) of research in cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary theory.2 Largely because of these efforts, we are poised at the brink of some of the most exciting and productive... (shrink)

Modern views of poetry tend to concord with Wallace Stevens’s insistence that “God and the imagination are one,” assuming that the only meaning there is in the natural world is that which the poet makes. But Denise Levertov held instead that the poet’s word is a response to the beauty of the world as given by God, and that the poet’s task is to invite the reader to resonate with that experience. Drawing on current research from neurocognitive poetics that indicates (...) how readers experience beauty in language, this essay seeks to demonstrate how Levertov’s poem, “O Taste and See,” embodies an invitation for the reader to engage one’s senses in the discovery of God through the beauty of poetry and created being. (shrink)