Tuesday, November 18, 2008

"I shan't publish it. The journals will think it barbarous.”

Another review of Ron Hansen's Exiles, this one in Godspy.
Though Hopkins scrupled over his love of nature-infused poetry (wondering whether the art was suspect for its worldliness and emphasis on delights of the senses), his instincts were correct. As Hans Urs van Balthasar wrote in Seeing the Form, “The resurrection of the flesh vindicates the poets in a definitive sense: the aesthetic scheme of things, which allows us to possess the infinite within the finitude of form (however it is seen, understood, or grasped spiritually), is right.”

Hmm. That's awfully confident.

4 comments:

Dr. Thursday said...

I can make no comment about these writers, but something about the idea chimed with something from another writer I do know:

"If the world had ever had the chance to grow weary of demonic, it might have been healed merely by becoming sane. But if it had grown weary even of being sane, what was to happen, except what did happen? Nor is it false to conceive the Arcadian shepherd of the Eclogues as rejoicing in what did happen. One of the Eclogues has even been claimed as a prophecy of what did happen. But it is quite as much in the tone and incidental diction of the great poet that we feel the potential sympathy with the great event; and even in their own human phrases the voices of the Virgilian shepherds might more than once have broken upon more than the tenderness of Italy... Incipe, parve puer, risu cognoscere matrem... They might have found in that strange place all that was best in the last traditions of the Latins; and something better than a wooden idol standing up forever for the pillar of the human family; a household god. But they and all the other mythologists would be justified in rejoicing that the event had fulfilled not merely the mysticism but the materialism of mythology Mythology had many sins; but it had not been wrong in being as carnal as the Incarnation."
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:307-8]

and this too:

"There really was a new reason for regarding the senses, and the sensations of the body, and the experiences of the common man, with a reverence at which great Aristotle would have stared, and no man in the ancient world could have begun to understand. The Body was no longer what it was when Plato and Porphyry and the old mystics had left it for dead. It had hung upon a gibbet. It had risen from a tomb. It was no longer possible for the soul to despise the senses, which had been the organs of something that was more than man. Plato might despise the flesh; but God had not despised it."
[GKC St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:493]

To which one might tie in the verse from the Te Deum: Non horruisti virginis uterum - "You (God) did not despise the Virgin's womb."

Sheila said...

The very thing I thought of!

Is Hopkins really all that different from St. Francis? Both signaled the end of a purgative time and the dawn of a time for rejoicing in the senses.

Unfortunately our age has not, for the most part, taken "rejoicing in the senses" in a Hopkins sense at all.

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