Spicer taught a version of antinomianism which encouraged learning through opposition and confrontation…. [He] wanted, through his poetry, to defamiliarize language, to "spook" words into new contexts for which the criteria of truthfulness were not at issue. (p. 105)

Language cannot fill that absence which the poet feels between God and himself; it cannot replace one absence with another. It can only record its own coming-to-be, its own incarnation, in the poem. Spicer's Logos is presented as a dictated message which comes from that absolute gulf between man and God.

The work of Spicer's in which this dictation makes its first appearance is Heads of the Town up to the Aether, a book which explores ideas of incarnation and absence as central themes. It is based loosely on a tripartite structure which Spicer compares to Dante's Divine Comedy. The similarity between the two works, while not immediately apparent, occurs...