“The secret at the heart of poetry”

released 6/18/2026

In this November 2025 lecture, Glenn Arbery draws on the work of Louise Cowan and several key phenomenologists to explore how lyric poetry works to reveal essential insights into human and transcendent experience. Using various poems as examples, Arbery traces lyric poetry’s ability to illuminate what Jacques Maritain refers to as the inner beings of things and of people. He wonders whether, in our increasingly technological age, this form of literature is precisely what we need to be awakened from dead language into a revelatory relation to the given world. Lyric unlocks the secrets that we need to recover.

This lecture is provided courtesy of the Center for Beauty and Culture at Benedictine College. It is the first of two lectures; the second, “The Tragic Self,” may be found here.

47 minutes

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