SOURCE: "The Lucid Moment," in The New Republic, Vol. 218, No. 12, March 23, 1998, pp. 36-40.

In the following essay, Kirsch considers Myticism for Beginners in relation to Zagajewski's early work and compares his "philosophical wit" with the imagery of metaphysical poets such as John Donne.

A poetry of mysticism, now? For a mystic of the seventeenth century, for Vaughan or Traherne, the object of mysticism was the old one, the obvious one: God, or Christ. For a Romantic neo-Platonist such as Shelley, the object was less clear, but still plausible: the Idea, the great pattern hidden from human sight. But if Romanticism was spilt religion, today the spill has just about been sopped up; and the presumption, or even the suggestion, of a mystical dimension to life can seem anachronistic, an evasion of the real and secular responsibilities of the time. So how can a poet—an intelligent, serious poet...