Gentle Readers! I regret having missed so many months of posting on this blog. I will now begin again, so that we can continue reading Hopkins' masterpiece "The Wreck of the Deutschland!" Keep alert, and the postings are beginning again!
At Seattle Opera we are doing a production of Richard Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman," which has inspired me to return to more orthodox art! But a comparison of Hopkins' Catholic vision and Wagner's Romantic vision is instructive. It shows us that Romanticism is really a kind of Catholic heresy: for the Romantic generation was the first generation of European artists who almost completely dumped Christianity and thus created a void in their imaginations' horizons. Suddenly, without a God and without an Incarnation and without a Church, the Romantics still needed a way to express their immortal longings. Romanticism is like a ruined Gothic chapel--the ruins, the fragments, the remains of a Catholic faith, no longer the sanctuary of the Blessed Sacrament, but now a ruin haunted by ghosts and monsters. Hopkins' poetry redirects Romanticism to its real goal--the One True Good and Beautiful God.
At Seattle Opera we are doing a production of Richard Wagner's "The Flying Dutchman," which has inspired me to return to more orthodox art! But a comparison of Hopkins' Catholic vision and Wagner's Romantic vision is instructive. It shows us that Romanticism is really a kind of Catholic heresy: for the Romantic generation was the first generation of European artists who almost completely dumped Christianity and thus created a void in their imaginations' horizons. Suddenly, without a God and without an Incarnation and without a Church, the Romantics still needed a way to express their immortal longings. Romanticism is like a ruined Gothic chapel--the ruins, the fragments, the remains of a Catholic faith, no longer the sanctuary of the Blessed Sacrament, but now a ruin haunted by ghosts and monsters. Hopkins' poetry redirects Romanticism to its real goal--the One True Good and Beautiful God.
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