ABSTRACT
One recurrent use of the language relates to the overcoming of successiveness, the transcending of time. Poetry and music both, as arts of time, consist necessarily of temporally successive parts. To show the religious impressiveness and prima facie inevitability of this idea of time-transcendence is not, however, to demonstrate its ultimate coherence. Imagist aesthetics caught up this theme; and a poem was characteristically described as a static, timeless artefact, very often in metaphors drawn from the static visual arts. Among literary critics Murray Krieger is particularly alert to the dangers of onesided emphasis on the timeless emergent structure. See his study, The Ekphrastic Principle and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laoko Revisited to which Patrick Hutchings' second paper drew the attention. Lastly, from a range of experiences, taken as necessarily incomplete transcendence, there can be no direct argument to a total divine transcendence of the material, spatial and temporal world.
