The poetics of Mallarme, Hopkins and Apollinaire (Stephane Mallarme, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Guillaume Apollinaire, France)

The Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis is employed here in a study of three grammatically innovative poets: two late-19th century experimenters, Stéphane Mallarmé and Gerard Manley Hopkins, who push the cognitive predispositions of French and English towards the limits; and one early-20th century poet, Guillaume Apollinaire, who to a great extent overcomes such linguistic determinism, demonstrating how Gallic “essence” and Germanic “existence” may be balanced in a more consciously transnational poetry.; Given the linguistically archetypal character of the work of these poets, this study is also an investigation into the nature of language itself, on the one hand, aesthetic artifice (as in Mallarmé), and on the other hand, immediate connection to the world (as in Hopkins); and when these modes of understanding are combined, language becomes (as in Apollinaire) a medium of active intellectual engagement with the world, by which we both create and are created—a poetry, in the words of Wallace Stevens, “wholly containing the mind”.; A simple description of this study could thus be given in the Hegelian formula: primary mind (Hopkins) + secondary mind (Mallarmé) = World Spirit (Apollinaire). But the arguments full elaboration is less simple than that, since both Mallarmé and Hopkins counterbalance their poetry to a great extent with its non-native complement: Mallarmé incorporating “musique” and “mystère” into his predominantly as the idealized end-point and consummation of endless Germanic flux. Apollinaire's more pragmatic poetry may be considered to be a work of social and personal Numerous poems by each of these writers are analysed and interpreted in the light of this theory, with frequent reference to Hegel in the reading of Mallarmé, to Heidegger in the reading of Hopkins, and to various thinkers (particularly Nietzsche, J. L. Austin, and Julia Kristeva) in the reading of Apollinaire.