Lunch Lecture: "Emanation of Essence through Word and Melody"
“Emanation of Essence through Word and Melody: A Comparative Analysis of Momčilo Nastasijević and Gerard Manley Hopkins”
Nemanja Ćurčić
Abstract:
Both Nastasijević and Hopkins occupy a distinctive position in their respective national literatures as prominent proto-Modernist figures, embracing highly experimental textual practices while continuing to focus on the major themes manifested in Romanticism. Furthermore, both poets relied on native languages that they elevated to unprecedented heights by employing linguistic experimentation, polysemantic layering, and melodic interplay that provide additional layers of meaning to their work.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, although writing within the confines of the traditional Victorian norms, employs strikingly experimental verbal and poetic inventions, especially in rhythm and wordplay. Additionally, through the concepts of "inscape" and "instress," he explores how inspired poetry can invoke the spiritual essence of the material world. Innovative, modern, and deeply religious, Hopkins' notions of language and poetry provide profound insights into an embodied essence of individuality and the patterns of perfection present in everything found in nature.
Momčilo Nastasijević, likewise, explores the depths of poetry through his quest to seek and unearth the "mother melody." Profoundly experimental, he refines the language in his poems in an attempt to turn them into vessels for a universal song not bound by individual grammars. He reinstitutes rhythm and voice as equal, or even more important, than words as the primary bearers of meaning. Nastasijević's poetic and unreservedly "inherent" language attempts to predate semantic meaning. In the process, it brings into question the existential role of language in spirituality, individuality, and essence of every element in nature.
Although the two poets lived in different times, places, and cultural, linguistic, and literary backgrounds, both explore the same concepts through similar perspectives: the innate, immutable characteristics of the mother tongue and the ability of a language elevated to poetry to capture and convey the essence of meaning concealed in the material world - through words, forms, and melody.
By comparing the poetics of the two poets through close reading of their poetry, the goal of the thesis is to show how experimental form becomes a method for approaching the “essence” and how it becomes an attempt to unearth the universal spiritual denominator not clearly expressed in ordinary language. The comparison further motivates a critique of semantic primacy and frames poetic meaning as intranslatable: not as a practical difficulty alone but as a consequence of the innateness of melody, sound, and rhythm and the role they play in conveying sense.