ABSTRACT
Joel D. S. Rasmussen's original contribution to the area, lies with his identification of the ways in which Soren Kierkegaard's poetics has what he calls a "Christomorphic" character, how it is contoured by Kierkegaard's thinking on the Incarnation. He further demonstrates how for Kierkegaard the Romantic ideal of "living poetically" becomes transfigured into "letting oneself be composed poetically by God" by use of a quotation to that effect from Kierkegaard's Magister dissertation. Where Romantic aesthetics escapes into infinite irony, in the end alienating itself from the finite world, Kierkegaard wishes for poetics to remain grounded in the realm of the actual. Points of criticism to be made about Between Irony and Witness are few and minor. Michael Strawser and Mark Lloyd make the fair point that there is plenty of "love" in Rasmussen's study but not so much of the eponymous "faith" and "hope."
