ABSTRACT
Miller is generous as a teacher, scholar and colleague, encouraging others. This chapter is an instance of this encouragement and collaboration as well as an example of comparison. J. Hillis Miller and Ranjan Ghosh provide different but productive ways to think about poetics and to read poetry closely and with attention. Reading poetry is the heart of the verbal world, just as understanding numbers is the heart of the realms of mathematics and physics. Paul de Man’s reading of Michael Riffaterre’s reading of a short poem by Victor Hugo generates the idea of “the materiality of inscription,” and Miller, like Tom Cohen, sees this concept as operating in climate change, finance, politics and the like. Miller distinguishes between the Bible and religious poetry, the secular and the sacred, which is quite different from the union (sahit) within sahitya, unity with the sacred that literature represents obliquely.
