ABSTRACT
This chapter explores that early modern religious poetics depends on preserving the cognitive, organizational and ethical value of metaphor in the construction of knowledge. It was not so much that church culture was divested of its content, leaving an empty shell of poetry, but that poetry, as a cultural mode of real power, was left carrying the heavy burden of religious meaning. The poetry's relationship to religious metaphor was more significant than the simple history of figures will show, and by attention to this relationship as it is justified and exploited in the poetry, the metaphors that have proved so intriguing to scholarly readers are not explained away', but enlivened and enriched. The world of religion is imaginative, pregnant with metaphoric images. The task of theology is conceptual, the articulation and interpretation of the religious imagination'. In religion, divine truth is revealed in illuminating metaphors which are to be experienced imaginatively and thence carried into the practise of faith.
