"Hopkins has style, style to burn, onto-theological style . . . He has, in fact, great style. Great style is transcendence and flash. It is that moment of exscalation that moment when the light of recognition and understanding, the phosphorous-flare of perception renatures a thing. You find the burn and you feed it. There is, as Hopkins said, the dearest freshness deep down things. True style exfoliates this into the sudden glare of awareness. Great style is like that, linked moments of exscalation down the page--fluid, not static and insular, the after-aura of rediscovery flooding the thing in question. I'm talking about poems here--the after-aura spreading and interlocking, a retreating radiance highlighting language and its excavations of new combinations and new geographies . . . Perhaps [Hopkin's poems] were written for instruments that don't exist yet."
-Charles Wright
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