Through the millennia, poets have been the medium through which a culture talks of, and to, its gods. Now, in this learned but lively commentary, Peggy Rosenthal shows us the astonishing range of poetic encounters with the figure of Jesus. Beginning with a reappraisal of Jesus as a poetic subject from biblical times through the eighteenth century, Rosenthal encounters along the way the work of such canonical writers as Dante, John of the Cross, and Milton, and also makes several fascnating detours, including a look at the work of a group of seventeenth-century Chinese poets.