Thick and Dazzling DarknessHow do poets use language to render the transcendent, often dizzyingly inexpressible nature of the divine? In an age of secularism, does spirituality have a place in modern American poetry? In Thick and Dazzling Darkness, Peter O'Leary reads a diverse set of writers to argue for the existence and importance of religious poetry in twentieth and twenty first century American literature. He traces a poetic genealogy that begins with Whitman and Dickinson