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Immanence

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Immanence is the idea that the divine or ultimate reality is present within the material world, not separate from it.

Detailed Definition
Poetic immanence appears as sacramental vision—finding the sacred in the ordinary. Nature poetry, mysticism, and ecopoetics often express this, using sensory detail to reveal transcendence within immanence, rejecting dualistic separation of spirit and matter.
Example
Example in poetry:
Walt Whitman’s "Song of Myself" finds the divine in grass, bodies, and common labor—immanence as sacred presence; Gerard Manley Hopkins’s "God’s Grandeur" sees divine energy "charged" in the world; William Blake’s "Auguries of Innocence" declares "to see a World in a Grain of Sand"—immanence as microcosm; Rumi’s poetry locates the Beloved within the heart, not beyond; Mary Oliver’s nature poems treat the earth as inherently numinous, rejecting transcendence elsewhere.
Additional Notes
Immanence (divine within the world) contrasts with transcendence (divine beyond); it appears in sacramental nature poetry (Hopkins, Oliver) and pantheism (Wordsworth); useful for interpreting how poems locate the sacred—not in heaven but in soil, breath, or daily ritual—challenging dualistic spirituality that devalues the material.
Also Known As
Immanentism Panentheism (in some contexts)
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