ABSTRACT
Sylvia Walsh's Living Poetically is an extensive analysis of the convoluted interactions between aesthetic-poetic existence and religious ideality in Soren Kierkegaard's corpus. Walsh holds that Kierkegaard's criticisms of Romantic irony can be read in the same direction. Walsh also observes that Kierkegaard's anti-Romanticism coheres with a specifically Christian aesthetics. Herein Walsh identifies the reason why religious development concurs with artistic creativity and remains anti-solipsistic. Walsh does not give enough credit to the early pietistic tenor of Kierkegaard's authorship. In Philosophical Fragments, Walsh stresses the aestheticism implicit in the pathos of God's agapeic embodiment in a particular historical individual. Walsh invokes the similitude between artistry and genuine communication, together with Johannes Climacus' thesis that the self's actuality can be described only as possibility. Walsh recalls that during these years Kierkegaard consistently called himself a Christian poet, while his edifying output was not incongruous with poetic communication.
