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Hopkins’s Poetic Porcupines and the Aesthetic of Taste

Jude V. Nixon    Salem State University, USA    

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abstract

Using Friedrich Schlegel’s conceptualisation of the fragment as something beautiful in its own isolated and incomplete yet integral form, «Poetic Porcupines and the Aesthetic of Taste» examines the unfished Hopkins poem as something finished and bearing its own attendant beauty. A prevailing fragmentary impulse is evident in Hopkins’s poetry as well as in his prose texts. Even his life might be characterized as fragment, defined by incompleteness, injury, waste, wreck, and ruin. The Hopkins unfinished poem should be read in light of seminal aesthetic notions of perfection in which aesthetic closure satisfies even as it preserves continuance. Kant’s concept of the end and of perfection also comments informatively on Hopkins’s poetic oeuvre as well as on his personal and priestly life. Hopkins’s fragments are poetic porcupines, miniature works of art severed and isolated from the larger whole, but entirely self-contained and unfinished in their completion.  

Published
Dec. 1, 2015
Language
EN

Keywords: FragmentClosureTasteGerard Manley Hopkins

Copyright: © 2015 Jude V. Nixon. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.