Literally literary

I'm a bit befuddled, metaphysically and scientifically and philosophically and poetically, by a statement I encountered while doing research for my MLA paper. In "Wright's Lyricism" (Southern Review 1991), Nathan A. Scott says this about James Wright's poem "A Blessing": "in this moment in which the frontier line between nature and the human order is wholly transcended the spirit of the visitor literally flowers."

He is referring to the final lines of the poem:

Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Now let's just ignore Scott's overlooking that small but important word "if," and let's not be distracted by the fact that a body from which the "I" has "stepped out" is what we call a corpse. What I can't get past is Scott's assertion that in this poem, "the spirit of the visitor literally flowers."

We've all heard of or perhaps experienced a metaphorical flowering of the spirit, but if a spirit flowered--literally--right in front of me, I do not know how I would recognize the phenomenon. What does a literally flowering spirit look like? What, for that matter, does a literal spirit look like? How is it possible to say that a literal flowering is occuring in an entity that we cannot see or touch or even clearly define?

Marianne Moore wants poets to create "imaginary gardens with real toads in them," but Nathan Scott wants to plant a literal garden in which metaphysical entities flower. I'd like to get my hands on some of those seeds.