The Eighth Day

Geoffrey Hartman is best known as one of the most eminent literary scholars and theorists of the past half century, going back to his first book, The Unmediated Vision (1954). His book on Wordsworth, published ten years later, remains a standard work, perhaps the single most searching study of Wordsworth’s poetry to appear in the twentieth century. That Hartman has also written and published poetry is not so widely known, previously publishing two small volumes, Akiba’s Children (1978) and The Bible in Italy (2004). These works represents a hidden, more personal side of this major literary figure. They show him engaging with Judaism and the Bible in ways that surfaced only much later in his critical prose. Through his poetry Hartman has been able to express more fully and imaginatively his thoughts about life, religion, and poetry itself. The Eighth Day combines never-before-seen poems with most of those of his previous two volumes. Altogether, these poems reveal a facet of Hartman’s work that students and scholars of poetry will find most illuminating.