Poem as Endangered Being: Lacostian Soundings in Hopkins's Hurrahing and Stevens's Blackbird
This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of things to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a poem is endangeredcrossed between the concrete and the abstract, the perceived a...
| Published in: | Religions |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
MDPI
[2016]
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| In: |
Religions
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| Further subjects: | B
Gerard Manley Hopkins
B Phenomenology B Wallace Stevens B Jean-Yves-Lacoste B Poetry B Martin Heidegger B Sacraments |
| Online Access: |
Presumably Free Access Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Summary: | This essay situates the recent phenomenology of French Heideggerean-priest Jean-Yves Lacoste in Être en Danger (2011) in a wider discussion of the sacramentology of things to pursue the hypothesis that the being of a poem is endangeredcrossed between the concrete and the abstract, the perceived and the imagined, the object and the thing. Whereas for Heidegger danger entails a technocratic closure of Dasein's being-toward-death, for Lacoste danger is proper to the being of life. Lacoste offers two counter-existentials to show, contra Heidegger, that life simply cannot be being-toward-death all the time: sabbatical experience and art experience. It is to these kinds of experience that poetry clearly belongs. To illustrate what Lacoste means by sabbatical experience, I offer a reading of G.M. Hopkins's Hurrahing in Harvest (1877); to illustrate what Lacoste means by art experience, I turn to Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (1917). Finally, I conclude that rather than contrast the secular poem with the religious poem it is best to think of all poetry as generically sacramental, i.e., signs and things (signum et res), with religious poetry constituting an excessive pole that is addressed to the sacrament of God (res tantum). The Christian loves the poem because the poem does not make him or her choose between God and thingsin light of the Incarnation, an insupportable choice. |
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| ISSN: | 2077-1444 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religions
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.3390/rel7120146 |