When Language Transforms into Image: Concrete Metamorphosis in Contemporary Catholic Poetry – Konrad Weiß and Gerard Manley Hopkins

Abstract

Why is it easier to link poetry and its imagery to religion than to the language of discourse that obeys an instrumental reason? Perhaps it refers too much to communicational configurations and thus to dialogicity. The alternative deals with a special evidence of aesthetic und religious experiences, without causal-practical connectivity. How can it be expressed? How is communication heard with and through language and how does this language speak when it merges religion and poetry? Visuality und pictoriality needs something like concretization. Poetry uses the ways of tropism to avoid paraphrases. The picture clarifies a situation and makes it more concrete, simulates a form of presence, without being towards a direct comprehensibility or reference.

In the field of sacred art and iconography, this is of great importance and is taken up by poets of modern literary Catholicism like Konrad Weiß and Gerard Manley Hopkins and it is associated with a certain poetological concept: To the detriment of a semantizing language, the management of the image in the lyrical word creates a presence and at the same time more contemplative encounter or contemplation/reception of the sacred events of salvation and creation, in which the hidden function of this strong denominational poetry lies.