Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of “religious poems”, some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.

In 1864 the poet, Walt Whitman, was terminated from his job as a clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs of the Department of the Interior. The reason was that the incoming Secretary of the Department read 'Leaves of Grass' and decided that Whitman was a publisher of vulgar literature. William Douglas O'Connor was a close friend and published this book to defend Whitman and 'Leaves of Grass' by stating that a lot of classic literature is filled with profanity and obscenity and that the book was one of them.

Firmly establishes the importance of early affective devotion in the hybrid poetics of the earliest English poetry.