On the Shore of Nothingness: A Study in Cognitive Poetics

This book does not study religious ideas for their own sake, but how religious ideas are turned into verbal imitations of religious experience by poetic structure. Even such words as ecstasy or mysticism denote clear-cut concepts. It investigates how such a conceptual language can convey such non-conceptual experiences as meditation, ecstasy or mystic insights. Briefly, it explores how the poet, by using words, can express the ineffable. It submits to close reading English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Armenian and Hebrew texts, from the Bible, through medieval, renaissance, metaphysical and baroque poetry to (secular) romantic and symbolistic poetry.