Two Perspectives on Abraham Regelson's "Hakukot Otiyotayich" (Engraved are Your Letters)

"Hakukot Otiyotayich" (Engraved are your letters), the "amazing" song of praise to the Hebrew language by the Hebrew-American poet Abraham Regelson (1896-1980) has received very little critical attention, none of it from a major literary critic. The system that filters, absorbs, and canonizes Hebrew culture has consigned the poem, as well as Regelson's poetic corpus in general, to relatively minor critics who themselves were all but forgotten. The crowning glory of Regelson's poetry remains forgotten, absent, unknown. "Hakukot Otiyotayich" is a poem of dense and rich rhetoric, wound in a tight web of philosophical concepts and ideas. The present article proposes a rhetorical and philosophical analysis of this long (twenty stanzas) and complex composition, one of the most unique and extraordinary poems in modern Hebrew poetry.