At some point, everyone has seen the validity of the old saw “Never judge a book by its cover.” Readers of Michael D. Hurley’s new book Faith in Poetry: Verse Style as a Mode of Religious Belief might add the caveat: don’t judge a book by its title, either.1 Readers might reasonably approach Hurley’s book with the expectation of a synoptic study of religious poetry, or with the expectation of a specific argument regarding the nexus of the religious and the aesthetic in poetry at large, or with the expectation of a broad thesis pertaining to theology and prosody. These readers will be either disappointed or pleasantly surprised by the book itself. As Hurley notes, “This book . . . does not seek to offer its own overarching literary-religious narrative, by a top-down panoptic. Instead, it works from the bottom up, by assaying the ways in which faith in poetry was conceived and practiced in the works of five of the period’s finest poets.” While this method deprives the book of narrative drive and developmental momentum, it also frequently affords it an accuracy in which readers, weary of the slovenly generalizations too often found in academic writing, may luxuriate.

Certainly, the great virtue of Hurley’s book resides in its author’s ability to distinguish between poems themselves and their academic coverage. Hurley discovers, or rediscovers, poems that have too long been covered up by generalities, whether the generalities of literary history or of various ideologies. Wiping clean the