Search

This dissertation argues that there are dual realities in Kevin Hart’s poetic space, and this space includes the elements of classicism, romanticism, modernism (cubism, surrealism), dual tradition of theology (positive theology and negative theology), and French post-phenomenological thinking. The dual realities are testified to by some binary pairs in Hart’s poetry: the concrete, conscious, definite, familiar, natural, phenomenal, physical, and positive standing side by side with the abstract, higher, ideal, indefinite, intellectual, metaphysical, negative, philosophical, surreal, transcendental, and unconscious. The latter are achieved from the former through a process of transcending or going beyond, and the mediums between the two poles of binary pairs are death, denial, denudation, deprivation, dying, idealisation, negation, rejection, transgression, transcendence, and transformation. While maintaining that there are dual realities in Hart’s poetic space, this dissertation explores and demonstrates the poet’s affinity with and the influences of various figures from literary, philosophical, and theological traditions in two ways: historically and horizontally. Through comparison and contrast, it is seen historically that Hart is close to Pope, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Apollinaire, Jacob, and Breton; and that he is even closer, when spiritual faith is reflected in his poems, to the Bible’s Solomon and the mediaeval poets, especially certain anonymous lyricists, and to Herbert and Hopkins; and that Hart is also close to such Christian mystics as Augustine, Bernard, Eckhart, John of the Cross, Gilbert, Isaac, Plato, Plotinus, and Pseudo-Dionysius. Hart’s horizontal or contemporary influences come from such figures as Bataille, Blanchot, Bloom, Derrida, and Levinas. Although he is influenced by those figures the poet does not remain in the stage of being influenced: Hart transcends the influences by creating his own poetry and his own art.